


The Revenant

by Renaerys



Category: Naruto
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), F/M, Rating bump, The Devil You Know, and i know this particular bastard too well, gonna leave it at T for now but honestly, i cannot believe i'm back here again, naruto renaissance 2K19, post-Invasion of Pein AU, you know what you're in for with sasosaku from me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2020-03-26 19:53:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19012753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Renaerys/pseuds/Renaerys
Summary: Pein has decimated Konoha and half its population along with it, revealing the frightening power of an enemy far beyond anything Konoha's heroes have ever thought possible. With so little time and so much to lose in the coming world war, Sakura goes to the Shikkotsu Forest in search of a new power to aid her allies.But the sacred forest is an inhospitable wasteland forbidden to humans for a reason. Caught between madness and magic, she will face her greatest enemy yet: herself.





	1. Feels Like Thunder

**Author's Note:**

> If you're here because you remember 2014, then I heartily salute you.
> 
> SasoSaku, the OG OTP.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Inspiration](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKnMS5MLZmY)

When I was a little girl, my mother held me close—

_Don’t be afraid, my flower_

_You are not alone._

Her whisper in the darkness, her warmth in my hair.

_I am not alone._

.

.

.

I am not alone.

.

.

.

I-I am not alone—

* * *

 

It had been three days since Sakura had last seen the sun. 

It was there, she knew. She saw it when she looked up through the bone-white canopy leaves each as long as a man grown. Their blue veins shone black under the harsh light above, silhouetted spiderwebs caging her in. She need only climb, of course. A bit of chakra to stick her steps, a kunai to hack her way through.

They were only leaves. Their tainted blood couldn’t hurt her. She was still here, sucking in air and frightfully aware. Not like the frogs that did not croak, nor the birds that did not sing. _She_ was still here. And here she would remain. 

Sakura pursed her lips and clung to that thought: 

_Here I will remain._

* * *

 

Time passed differently in the Shikkotsu Forest. 

Funny how they say that about time passing, as if it were a stranger on the sidewalk shuffling past. Your eyes catch for a moment, a blink, and then he’s gone. But you might see him again sometime walking that same path, eyes searching, searching for—

Connection?

Inspiration?

Distraction?

Distraction.

Sakura could not afford a distraction. Time was preciously scant as it was, and she had the weight of souls upon her shoulders. 

_“You will train,”_ Tsunade had told her. _“You will learn.”_

_“What will I learn?”_

Tsunade did not have the answer to her question. Perhaps that was why she had sent Sakura here to this place. This dead place. 

No, a place where even the dead did not dwell.

Her chakra helped. Her perfect control over it did the rest. It was no easy task metabolizing the poison she inhaled with every breath, but then, she had not come here thinking it would be easy. She had come here because she had nowhere else to go. 

_“You will learn,”_ Tsunade had promised, entreated, commanded. 

So far, Sakura had learned how not to suffocate. 

Barely.

She rested her hand upon the porous, spongy trunk of a tree. Blue-black sap oozed from the pores in its alabaster bark. She had the sudden, delirious urge to taste that succor, coat her tongue until it was saccharine, and swallow. Coating her fingers, it was warm and soft, like chocolate.

Madness, that. 

She hastily wiped her poisoned fingers on the brittle, blanched grass that brushed her knees. She would need to learn faster if she hoped to conquer this place with her life intact. 

_Crrrrrraaackkkkk!!_

Trees falling, collapsing all around her. On top of her. A scream, but this labyrinth devoured sound like a starving beast. Teeth, tongues, dripping their black and blue bile onto her, into her, after her. 

Running. 

_Run, you idiot!_

There is nothing more harrowing than running with nowhere to go but _deeper_. 

Deeper into the forest where the dead don’t go, Sakura ran, plunged, plummeted—

_Hrrrrroooaaarrrgghhhhh…_

Massive, it had to be. Nothing short of eldritch could make a sound like that. Branches slapped and scraped, greedy for a piece of her. But they did not follow into the water, rushing and gushing. The sun she could not see could not see her, either. She tumbled down the cataract just as _something tumbled after her and—_

* * *

 

She was magnificent, the new Hokage Naruto and Jiraya had brought back. 

_Magnificent!!_ Sakura remembered thinking as Tsunade emerged in her Hokage regalia like a queen, or an empress, or a goddess. 

Sakura had never seen anything like it when Tsunade raised a mangled cat from beyond the veil. The child wept with relief, and Sakura wept with joy. 

Because this was it. This was what she had been searching for. There was no force on Earth stronger than death, except the power of those who had learned how to master it. Master death, and she might master life, too. 

To a thirteen-year-old girl, that is the most precious of dreams.

_“You will learn,”_ Tsunade said simply when Sakura failed time and again at the basics of medical ninjutsu. 

_“How? I’m trying!”_

But Tsunade was as unmoved by failure as she was by death. And like death, she was patient. 

_“Try again.”_

And Sakura tried again. She never stopped trying, and that— _that_ is why Tsunade apprenticed her above all the others who had come asking. 

When Sakura tried something, she did not give up until she fucking mastered it. 

* * *

 

_You’re one hell of a girl…_

_But I wonder—_

_How long can you last like this?_

* * *

 

Sakura woke to the echo of a very old nightmare. Its voice was rose petal soft along the shell of her ear, scraping teeth, whispering lips. She jerked, disoriented and dazed, her head pounding. It bled where she’d hit it on a rock drifting in the river. The cataract was nowhere to be seen—she must have drifted quite a ways. 

The riverbank was white stone and purple moss, the water cool and clear. It was dark, darker than before. She tasted the damp, heavy air with every shallow breath, and the sharp tang of her own blood. Right, that. Best heal it up before it became infected. 

Sakura drew upon her trusty chakra, pooled her life in her hands. Fingers dripping neon threaded through her wet, pink hair, kneading and healing. For a few precious minutes, she found herself in the familiar and the mundane. 

_I’m Sakura Haruno, apprentice to the Fifth Hokage._

_We’re going to war, and I’m not ready._

_That’s why I’m here._

_That’s why I’m here…_

She opened her eyes, the only green thing in the whole of the Shikkotsu Forest, and she saw. 

Here was a forest, and yet not. A world without the world, it was an old place forgotten at the horizon between fear and fable. Instead of sunlight, white. Instead of creature eyes, floating lights. No blooms, no birdsong, nobody. Only Sakura and the Ancient Ones who claimed this place as Theirs. 

She reached for one of the floating golden lights, tiny as a firefly and far more delicate. She shuddered when it kissed her fingertips and dissipated, leaving only a chill behind. Sakura did not know why or when she had begun to weep. She clutched her cold fingers close and mourned the loss of something that had never been there at all, never would be missed. 

She stood. Her training and her rational mind compelled her to seek shelter and safety. But since she’d set foot in this place, she had found no peace, no respite. Hell had no sanctuary, or else it would not be hell. 

She walked. Slowly at first, each step measured and light, quiet. Quiet…

A chill kissed her neck. More of the falling, floating lights descended around her. Curious, them. Sakura had never seen such an over saturation of natural energy gathered in one place. The mega flora, the supercharged air as thick as ozone, and all the ambient energy that was still too much to contain. Scientifically speaking, it was the true cause for the Shikkotsu Forest’s bizarre liminal state caught between life and death. Not spirits or fay magic, but teeming Senjutsu left unchecked. 

Poetically speaking, she was a girl lost in a wood older than time, and that story had a very familiar ending. 

The story called to her now as the floating lights seemed to drift almost uniformly deeper into the forest. Sakura brushed her bangs out of her eyes, hesitating. Really…what did she have to lose at this point? 

The path of light wended between trees as thick around as houses, and progress was slow-going. She heard nothing but the sound of her own progress, but every once in a while she cast a look back over her shoulder, wondering at the crawling sensation of eyes on her back and wishing she didn’t.

Hours she walked, maybe. Maybe it was only minutes. Maybe she was drowning at the bottom of the river and all this was a dream played out by her fast-dying brain cells trying to convince her she wasn’t already dead. Paranoid, Sakura walked faster. 

She couldn’t say when the doubt crept in. Perhaps it was always there lying in wait. 

_I’m lost._

_I haven’t eaten anything in days._

_I’m alone._

_No…I’m not._

That last one sent her heart pounding furiously until she thought she was suffocating. Gagging, she braced herself against a tree and heaved. No matter where she looked or how far she stretched her senses, there was nothing there. No sign of life at all. And yet, she could feel _something_ here. Something… Something that had so far tolerated her presence, content merely to watch, to wait. 

The floating lights clustered around a corner, ever silent and slow. Sakura steeled herself. 

She barely made it a few steps before she tripped and fell. Her stomach clenched with a hunger pang so severe she thought she might never stand again. Medical chakra helped, but it was not the nourishment her body needed. There was nothing here but venom. One taste and she would die for sure. 

“Damnit.”

A minute she lingered there, two, three. It was getting dark. 

“Get up, Sakura.” 

Knees wobbling, she forced herself up once more. Pain she could deal with. Pain was life. She was still alive. 

“Move.”

Slowly, surely, she moved. The lights dumped out into a clearing in the forest where the river divided in a manner too perfect to be natural. The island that bisected it was home to white stone ruins overtaken by white ivy. Strange, black fruit hung from the low branches of trees a more familiar size, and long purple gourds bulged from vines in what may once have been a carefully tended vegetable patch, now overgrown and wild. The lights gathered around and among the abandoned settlement as though drawn to it. Sakura could hardly believe her eyes. 

Revitalized, she stumbled toward it through the water. It was empty, of course. No one had been here in years, maybe even centuries. The roof had once been thatched, but it had rotted away in time and left the rooms exposed. They were basic but achingly human—a rudimentary kitchen, a bed filled with rotten leaves, even a privy that emptied into the stream. And the walls…

Sakura traced her fingers over an ancient rune carved directly into the alabaster stone, one of hundreds. They were a language she did not speak, but with which she had been familiar since her days as an Academy student. 

“Fuinjutsu,” she marveled. “So many…”

One she recognized easily, and her fingers lingered on it. The purification seal was the largest and most prominent of all the runes. Heart racing with an idea, she dared to hope as she made her way back outside to the fruit and vegetable garden. She plucked one of the plump, black fruits from the tree and brought it to her mouth, but hesitated. 

_What am I doing?_

If it was poisoned and she ate it, she would die. But if she did not eat, she would die anyway. In retrospect, she may have asked Tsunade about what in the hell she was supposed to eat in a forest where literally everything was poisonous. Next time. 

Sakura laughed at the absurd thought, and then immediately shut her mouth. 

Dread pooled in her gut at what she was about to do. 

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and bit into the fruit.

Her eyes flew open and she stared at the white meat of an apple. The tart fruit was exactly as any other she’d had in her life, and it went down sweet. She almost didn’t believe her luck, but when she took another bite, it tasted even better. She devoured it in a matter of seconds and still hungry, she reached for one of the blighted gourds next. It, too, was nothing but an ordinary vegetable. 

That night, Sakura feasted for the first time in days. She drank from the stream, and never had she tasted such crisp, sweet water. The bed she filled with fresh, fleshy leaves and purple moss. With a full belly and a soft place to lay her weary head, she fell asleep among the pretty little lights, and she dreamed. 

* * *

 

Once, I made a wish upon the Sun to bring me the Moon.

I missed him, you see. 

I missed him so much…

* * *

 

No.

Not that. Anything but that.

_“It’s a promise of a lifetime!”_

_No no no no no—_

* * *

 

Creaking, broken, wet. 

His swords cut her deep.

But his words cut deeper still.

_Why me? Why you?_

_Why is that the only way you can see the world?_

.

.

.

_Why must you ask such pointless questions?_

* * *

 

Sakura woke unable to breathe. She bolted upright in her bed, one hand around her throat and the other clutching a kunai. Tears stung her eyes as she gagged for breath and looked around. Fear made her quake. Her fingers were slick and clammy around the kunai. 

There was no one there. 

Of course there was no one there.

She took the kunai with her as she slowly slipped out of bed. 

A search of the ruins turned up nothing and no one. Outside, the sunlight cast its spiderweb glow through the veiny, blanched canopy. Ambient lights floated aimlessly. The vegetable garden was as she’d left it. Slowly, she lowered her kunai. 

_Get a grip, girl._

_It was only a dream._

It was only ever a dream when she thought of him. But he was as dead as this poisoned place, years ago. It had been ages since she’d entertained his nightmare. These days, there were so many others to choose from. 

She resolved not to think about him as she started her day, her first proper day. She resolved not to think of anyone or anything other than her purpose in coming here. Time was of the essence, and she could not afford to waste even a moment of it. 

That thought consumed her as she ran through her standard warm up. How much time did she really have, anyway? War did not just happen one day out of nowhere. It was not one explosive clash between good and evil, settled in a day with a clear winner and loser. No, war was an insidious beast, as subtle as cancer, in it for the long game. It picked off the weak from the shadows and slowly carved a path deeper, until there was no escaping. Nobody won in a war, and everyone lost something. Someone. Many already had.

The floating lights settled around her while she meditated. In its way, it was peaceful here. The stillness, the quiet, even the distant groan of the Ancient Ones who lingered here. Sakura had not yet seen Them, and she hoped she never would. 

She breathed deeply, and the tufts of light shuddered. In her mind’s eye, she imagined her chakra pouring out. Rivers and ribbons of white reached up and out, catching little lights in their web and drawing them in, into her. Their chill sank through her pores and raced through her veins. A sweet poison, electrifying as it lifted her mind and soul. She had an urge to open her eyes, but found it impossible. Something…something was here—there, in the gloom, far away, but she couldn’t, she can’t…

_More._

_I need more._

Sakura opened her mouth and tasted the acrid air on her tongue, chilly and damp. It filled her lungs, and she found that funny. Do the dead breathe? 

_A little more._

She could feel it pulling at her now, this flood in her fingertips, her lips, her lungs. It poured over her, through her, rising up and up like drowning, but each bitter breath only brought her higher. If only she could see! But she wasn’t strong enough. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t enough. 

_“You will learn,”_ Tsunade promised her. 

Sakura felt that vow like a brand upon her skin. Her forehead burned as the flood submerged her completely, and she gasped. 

Too much. 

It was too much. 

This power—

_Open!_

She opened her eyes, and the floodgates opened with them. The floating lights swirled furiously, buffeted by her chakra following a course all its own. It poured out of her, out of the Yin seal on her brow, everything she had nurtured for three years, awakened and open and free. She wanted to cry, to laugh, to marvel. This place, this power—

Sakura screamed as a crippling pain invaded her. It was under her fingernails, deep in her scar tissue, thunderous. She keeled over and clutched her forehead, the Yin seal pounding as though a stake were being hammered through it. Some of her chakra returned to her, all but ripping her apart as it reabsorbed with an almost human violence. 

Shaking and suffering, Sakura could only watch helplessly as the rest torpedoed faster and faster, melding with the floating lights in a bright cyclone. Terrified of whatever strange reaction she had carelessly triggered, she tried to scramble away before whatever it was expelled her the way it had her chakra, but she was too late. 

And nothing happened. 

No explosion, no burst, no violence at all. From within the curtain of solid, slippery, frozen light, a hand emerged. It dripped molten light, and it was followed by an arm and a shoulder. Sakura was paralyzed where she lay, her body aching, and watched as the memory of a man took his first step out of the bright into this strange, mad world. 

“Finally,” he said. “You of all people know how I hate waiting.”

He was as beautiful as he had always been, a corpse made perfect to soothe a broken heart. And Sakura’s heart surely broke to see him here. An old fear she had never been able to outrun filled the cracks in between as his honeyed gaze met hers for the first time in three years, and she shuddered. 

“Sasori.” 

* * *

 

“But I could train right here,” Sakura protested. “I’m more useful to you here in Konoha. There’s no reason to send me away.”

Tsunade, however, had made up her mind. “There’s a perfectly good reason: because I said so.”

“I don’t understand. I’m your only— I-I mean, with Shizune gone, I…” 

Tsunade frosted over, and Sakura knew she had said too much. Shame weighed her gaze. She wished she could take it back, take it all back. 

_Shizune, Kakashi, all of them…_

Gone.

“I just meant… Have I done something to disappoint you?”

Tsunade leaned back in her chair and sighed. “You haven’t disappointed me. If anything, it may be the other way around.”

Sakura sputtered. “O-Of course not! You could never! Training with you has been my proudest accomplishment.”

“Yes, well, that’s just the problem. There’s nothing else I have to teach you.”

“But you’re a Sannin! You’re the strongest shinobi in the whole village, and I—”

“And you are well on your way to surpassing me, if only you would let yourself.” 

Tsunade’s eyes glistened with emotion. Sakura stared in disbelief. “That’s…”

Tsunade smirked and laid her hand over Sakura’s across the desk in between them. “It’s the truth. Shizune’s death… It had nothing to do with this. I’m so proud of you, Sakura. I always have been.”

Sakura had begun to cry without even realizing it. Embarrassed, she hastily wiped her eyes, but Tsunade gave her a moment to gather herself. 

“I’m sorry,” Sakura said. 

“No need. I’m serious about your training. The Shikkotsu Forest is the ideal place for you to go.”

Sakura knew very little about the sacred forest. Few humans had ever dared tread there because it was said that the very air was toxic. It was also the home of the Ancient Ones, a race of slug and snail sages like Tsunade’s king summon, Katsuyu. 

“But even you never trained there. How could I possibly?”

“The difference between you and me is simply a matter of years. I’ve had many more to hone my skills. That will come for you in time. There’s no shortcut. But there is other knowledge out there. I never had the time at your age, and after the war when I did…” Tsunade trailed off and her gaze darkened. “I was too consumed by grief, but you still have time. This war that’s coming… It will cost you in ways you cannot imagine.”

Sakura knew there was nothing she could say to that, and yet her heart ached for Tsunade all the same. Dan, Nawaki, the Third Hokage, Jiraiya, and Shizune most recently—she had lost so many already. 

“It feels wrong to leave,” Sakura said truthfully. “When Naruto left to train on Mt. Myoboku…”

“That was different,” Tsunade said sternly. “You are not a Jinchuuriki. You’re not a target. But you could be so much more than you are, if you wanted it.”

If she wanted it. 

Did she?

“Death in full bloom,” Tsunade said. “That was how she described the poisonous Shikkotsu Forest.”

“Who?”

“Mito Uzumaki, my grandmother. She was the last person to have trained there.”

Sakura thought that sounded creepy as hell, but the fact that Tsunade thought she could handle the same training the legendary Mito Uzumaki had mastered made her blush. She was no Mito; she didn’t even hail from a noteworthy shinobi clan. What right did she have to tread on sacred ground meant for gods and legends?

“It sounds like a cruel place,” Sakura said. 

“It is. But its cruelty will keep you safe from the outside world. If you can survive that place, you can survive anything.”

Tsunade looked at her earnestly, desperately even. A place that would keep her safe…

Safe. 

Like Shizune and Kakashi and half of Konoha no longer were after Pein’s invasion. 

But Sakura wanted to do more than survive. Training with Tsunade had shown her that she could make a difference. She could rise. She could _win_. Maybe she could even help find justice for those who no longer had the chance.

And besides, she had always been particularly adept at beating poisons. 

“So? What will it be, Sakura?”

For the chance to surpass even the Hokage? Was such a power even within her grasp? Tsunade seemed to think so. And if she succeeded…

_“I promise, Sakura-chan. I’ll bring him back.”_

She could picture Naruto’s sunny smile that day so long ago. Nothing, not even the monster under his skin would keep him from his word. Even if it cost him his sanity, his life, his love. Nothing would ever make him break that promise to her. 

_“It’s the promise of a lifetime!”_

Sakura clenched her fists so hard her nails broke the skin. “When do I leave?”

* * *

 

“But you died,” Sakura said. “I was there.”

“I remember,” Sasori said. 

“This isn’t _possible_!”

“What an ignorant thing for a medical ninja to say.” He eyed a falling light and caught it in his palm. It settled there a moment until he snuffed it out with his fist. “Especially in a place like this.”

Sakura hardly heard him as she tried to process the reality of him standing right there. If she reached for him, what would he feel like? Was he a ghost come to haunt her, as he haunted her dreams? 

A dream, yes. 

_I’m dreaming._

She lurched toward him and reached, desperate to feel nothing at all because he couldn’t possibly _be_. 

“What are you—”

She grabbed his wrist. It was the last thing she remembered doing before she somehow ended up pinned to the wall. Golden chakra strings snaked around her limbs. He was out of reach. 

“You… You’re—” She couldn’t even say it. 

“Yes.” 

There was a pause as they regarded each other and Sakura tried to convince herself she had not gone mad after all. His look changed from hostile to coldly pensive, so subtle that she would not have noticed had he not been standing so close. 

“You didn’t mean to,” he said, almost a question. 

_“Didn’t mean to what?”_ She should have asked. But all she could think was that he had his strings around her throat and she could not _move_. All her training, all these years, and she was still fighting a losing battle back in that cave.

“Pointless.” He released her, and she gagged as sensation returned to her limbs. The white ivy clung to her as if to draw her into the wall. 

He turned from her, and Sakura was left with no choice but to believe. He was here, he was _alive_ , and…

“What did I do?” she asked, her voice cracking. 

He stopped and cast her a glance over his shoulder. Red bangs fell into his warm eyes, shapely and large for a man’s. Uncanny, the likeness he’d captured all those years ago. Almost perfect. 

“You remembered me.”

Sakura blinked. She could not say when she had begun to cry, and she could not say why. Just the sight of him, the _feel_ of him—

“But you’re real,” she said. “You’re _human_.”

He clenched his fist, and his strange, golden chakra writhed between his fingers. “I’ve always been human to you.”

* * *

 

Of all the twists and turns Sasori had accounted for in his endless planning, he could honestly say he had never imagined an outcome quite like this. And he was not sure how he felt about it. 

About her.

_Her._

The last sight he saw before darkness, and the first to call him back from it. In between…nothing. Numbing. Familiar. 

“But you’re real. You’re _human_.”

He could have laughed at her, but the joke was on him, then and now. And there just seemed to be no point in dragging it out any longer. Who was he fooling, anyway? “I’ve always been human to you.”

She shook her head. “No, that’s… No.”

“Sakura.”

That did something to her. He watched her denial slip through her fingers with her tears and leave her stranded and alone with only him.

“My god… It really is you.”

_Is it really me?_

Sasori was not sure. For all his genius, even he had failed to outpace death. But there was no jutsu at work here, no reanimation, no conjuring. There was only her and this haunted place that he felt deeply, though he did not recognize it. 

“What is this place?” he asked. 

She swallowed, wary. “The Shikkotsu Forest.”

Unbidden, Sasori remembered a dark and cold night from a lifetime ago. The heat of a fire warmed his untested palms, and a silken voice filled his ears. 

_“Some places cannot be found,”_ Orochimaru told him. _“Neither by the living nor the dead.”_

_“Then by who?”_

“It’s a sacred place. A…mad place,” Sakura said. 

_“Only by those who remember,”_ Orochimaru said, smiling, _“and the ones they can’t forget.”_

“Sasori.”

He let the memory fade and looked at her. Older, fuller, a woman grown. And yet, unsettlingly familiar. 

“Are you here to kill me?” She stared at him, her tears dried and sticky upon her cheeks. 

_If only it were so simple._

“No.”

A terrible cholera coiled beneath his skin at the sight of her there, staring doe-eyed and still, _still_ disbelieving, and he had to go. He had to _go_. 

She did not call for him when he disappeared into the forest.

* * *

 

Sakura was alone the rest of the day. The forest was quiet like usual, and the floating, golden lights lingered like usual. She began thinking of them as pyreflies, clinging to carrion the way they had clung to Sasori. Many of them even left with him, and like him, they had not returned. 

She couldn’t bring herself to resume her training while he was out there somewhere. Maybe watching her, maybe lying in wait. He said he wasn’t here to kill her, but how could she believe him? No one could hold a grudge like Sasori could. Sakura had seen that power first-hand. 

She had died for it. 

Her fingers found his scar under her red shirt, bubbled and pink. It had never healed right, and she’d never bothered to try. It was as much a part of her as a limb or an eye. His scar…

“What’s happening to me?”

The forest gave her no answer. She thought of Mito Uzumaki, who had found herself alone in this mad place before Sakura. How had she survived here? The solitude, the silence—it was suffocating. And all the protection and purification seals in the world could do nothing for Sakura now. 

It was this place.

Somehow, it had brought him back. 

She didn’t know how. She didn’t understand it. But there was no point in denying it. It was real… _he_ was real. And he was here with her, somewhere. 

Was it a test? 

What did it mean? And _why_?

* * *

 

There were only so many vegetables Sakura could chop up for her lunch before she started to feel like a paranoid housewife wondering if he would ever come back.

* * *

 

She would never sleep again.

Wide awake, Sakura got out of bed and lingered, phantomwise, in the doorway. Looping runes carved into the walls spoke to her, apocryphal voices of those who had been here before. They would remain long after she was gone. That thought made her terribly, terribly sad.

She ran her fingers over them as she passed. Beyond the doorway lay a bath of golden pyreflies, suspended in time. 

_Is that what we are?_

In a moment of madness, she knew it had to be him. Not Tsunade, not Kakashi, not Naruto or Ino or Lee or all the others whose eyes she had slowly opened, but the one who had opened her eyes first. 

“Sasori…”

He emerged from the shadows of the forest, and the pyreflies melted before him as he approached her. Their golden light reflected in his eyes, eyes that had seen the truth of her and paid the ultimate price. He dared not come closer. 

“Sakura.”

She shivered. He spoke her name like arsenic, softly swallowing. 

“There’s no leaving this place,” he said. 

A part of her wondered if she’d fallen asleep after all. There was a certain dream-like quality to Sasori as he was now illuminated in pyre light at the edge of the shadows. 

“No,” she said softly. “Not until I finish what I started.”

He regarded her with a pensive sort of disdain. “Then it appears our interests are aligned, for now.”

Sakura took a step toward him, but she dared not let go of the sealing wall, afraid she might not find her way back. “Then we agree. You and I… It’s in the past.”

He took his time answering her, which unsettled her deeply. Sasori was never one to drag things out, unless…

“Sleep,” he said, turning away. “You’re dead on your feet.”

Wraithlike, he melted once more into the shadows and took the light with him. 

* * *

 

He never did give her an answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all know the drill. Let me know what you think so far in the comments!


	2. Future is Past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe I've forgotten how much I love these two until now.
> 
> [Inspiration](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNrtc_U2wbU)

Unfortunately, Sakura did not get much sleep that night. Really, how could she? 

“There is an S-class Akatsuki criminal camping out in my front yard.”

Said no one, ever. 

And why…

_Why does he get to come back when Kakashi, Shizune, and all the others don’t?_

An intensely familiar wave of melancholy threatened to pull Sakura under thinking of all the ones who were lost, but she was allowed no time to drown in it. 

“You certainly enjoy your beauty sleep.”

Sasori sat in one of the colossal trees at the edge of the ruins looking bored. 

Sakura hastily wiped her eyes, though she had shed no tears. “Sorry,” she said, a little breathless.

_Why am I apologizing?_

He seemed to be wondering the same thing as he watched her like she was the greatest disappointment he had ever had the misfortune to know. After a moment of awkward silence, he gracefully jumped down and stalked toward her. Sakura allowed herself a moment to really look at him after all this time. 

He was really human.

She still could not quite believe it. 

But the rise and fall of his chest when he breathed dispelled all doubts. He was of a height with her, his red hair more disheveled, his round face less symmetrical than it had been as a puppet. The imperfection of being human… She would have laughed if she did not seriously believe he would retaliate over being laughed at. 

Even his clothes were different. Comfortable, brown and navy, practical; nothing special. No red clouds, no blackened nails, no trace of the monster he’d once been. 

Except, the way he looked at her. 

Like…

_Like it’s my fault._

“You’re staring,” he said, stopping an arm’s length in front of her. 

Sakura blushed. She flirted with the urge to break something. Preferably something very large and very hard. 

“Well, so are you,” she said, lamely. 

Another protracted silence, and Sakura had the absurd thought that this was almost worse. Worse than his acrimony, his disdain, his poison. The heady urge to break something was becoming overwhelming. 

“Relax,” he said, showing her his profile. Golden pyreflies moved with him. “I’m not going to attack you.”

He regarded her out of the corner of his eye. “Unless you want me to.”

Sakura squeezed her fists so hard she heard her knuckles crack. “Why the hell would I want that?”

The curl of his smirk taunted and tantalized, but he turned from her without a word and began walking away.

Flabbergasted, Sakura didn’t think before blurting out, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t have to.”

_Ass._

She watched him walk away, the long grass brushing his knees and the pyreflies following like lost souls with nowhere else to go. The darkness of the forest beyond swallowed him up, and she was alone again. 

Irritated, Sakura resolved to forget about him and finish her morning ablutions before getting to work. To hell with him, anyway. It wasn’t like she cared where he went or what he did. 

It didn’t occur to her until much later to wonder why he’d waited around until she woke up.

* * *

 

Hours passed, though Sakura couldn’t be sure how many exactly. Sunlight poured through the canopy as though through a storm cloud, grey and indigo; there was no telling just how late or how early it was. There was simply light, and then there was darkness. Nothing in between. 

She sat by the stream meditating, something she had never excelled at even before she had a justifiable reason for doing it. Sitting still had never come easy. Impatient by nature, Sakura preferred to keep her hands busy, whether it was stitching flesh or crushing stone. But all this _waiting_ was tiresome. 

And waiting for what, exactly? Tsunade had sent her here to train, to learn, but she’d left out a few vital details. Sakura supposed there wasn’t much to say, anyway. The only person in living memory who had trained here before was Mito Uzumaki, and she was far gone from this world. A shame, really.

Sakura let out a frustrated sigh and opened her eyes. Pyreflies lingered in her silhouette, suspended. She caught her reflection in the clear water, blurry and shaded. 

She knew why she was here. She felt it in the air around her, in the pyreflies that dwelled around her. All that power, it was here waiting, just like she was waiting. So why couldn’t she touch it? What was she missing? 

Naruto had had Jiraiya to guide him, and the frogs and toads of Mt. Myoboku to train him. But Sakura had no one. Not even the Ancient Ones revealed themselves to her. She had only herself. 

Herself, and…

“You’ve been sitting there for hours.”

Sakura jumped at the sound of Sasori’s voice directly above her. Leaping to her feet, she spotted him lounging in a tree up above, one leg dangling listlessly over the edge of a thick branch. 

“How long have you been up there?” she demanded. 

“Long enough to know whatever you’re doing isn’t working.”

The way he looked down at her over his nose boiled her blood. It reminded her of how he’d been when he’d first revealed himself after she’d smashed Hiruko: condescending, smug, and entirely above her until she brought him down a few pegs. She had half a mind to bring him down now, quite literally. Blighted the trees may be, but their pale trunks would splinter under her brute strength for a certainty. 

But that would be childish. Possibly also suicidal. Chiyo wasn’t here to help her this time. 

Sakura dusted off her skirt and resolved to get something to eat. Her concentration was ruined, anyway. “Excuse me.”

She didn’t make it two steps before he called to her. 

“Giving up already?”

Sakura glared up at him. “I don’t need your help.”

He looked bored, like a buzzing fly would have captured his interest more than a trivial thing like her anger. “Good, because I wasn’t offering.”

“ _Good_ , because I wasn’t asking.”

There was that damned smirk again. Subtle, quietly menacing. Dismissive. 

Sakura narrowed her eyes. What was he doing taunting her like that, anyway? What did he want? Why was he _here_? Sakura did not know the answers to her questions, but unfortunately, she knew him. Sasori rarely said or did anything without carefully calculated intention. 

“I could banish you,” she said darkly. “I brought you here, so I could send you away.”

His laughter surprised her, a warm, throaty trill that may have been pleasant if they were anyone but each other. “Then do it.”

Sakura dug her heel into the salted soil. “Don’t think I won’t.”

Sasori slipped down from the tree like slow-creeping magma. He landed almost silently and rose to his full, if modest, height. Sakura was sure she had never been so triggered by the sight of someone walking toward her in all her life, but she stubbornly held her ground. 

He leaned into her so close that she could smell him. 

“Then _do_ it.”

Sakura froze. He wasn’t attacking her, wasn’t even touching her, and yet she froze. 

She was back in that damp cave, cut up to hell and her luck run out, ashamed and afraid because no, she did not want to die no matter how tough she pretended to be. She wasn’t ready, and bravery was for the foolish and the fearless, of which Sakura was neither. 

Back in Sound, helpless as the boy she used to love and respect turned his callous blade upon his former teammates, and she had no power to stop it. 

A ruined Konoha, on her knees, her knuckles broken and bloody and her tears a demonic possession all-consuming as she languished atop the broken bodies of her comrades and begged for Naruto make it right. Just please make it right again. 

But not even he could conquer death. No more than she could. 

Not then, and not now.

She couldn’t banish Sasori, and they both knew it. 

“Huh,” he said. 

Bored and blasé, he left her there. Sakura watched him go, her shame and her pain momentarily forgotten to recall the transient glimmer in his pretty eyes he hadn’t quite managed to conceal from her. 

_Fury._

* * *

 

He doesn’t dream.

It’s not that he can’t remember dreams; he simply doesn’t have them. To dream, one must sleep. 

_“To dream, one must sleep,”_ Orochimaru says. _“Would you like to sleep, Sasori?”_

What an absurd question. 

The dead don’t dream.

Framed in firelight, even Orochimaru’s eyes are warm. _“What else would the dead do if not dream?”_

What else is there? 

What else…

* * *

 

Sasori jolted violently awake. For a terrifying moment, he did not know where he was. A problem quickly and methodically remedied. The mind and the heart may forgive and forget, but the body always remembers. 

A quick scan of his spongy, white surroundings and a lungful of acrid humidity were indelible reminders that yes, he was still here. Still trapped. Still alone. 

He allowed himself a moment of very fleeting, very human weakness and sighed in frustration. Indeed, the body remembered everything. But he quashed the thought, having indulged it quite enough for one day. 

The porous branch he was perched on was wide enough to seat two comfortably. He hadn’t meant to doze. The thought that he had was almost as infuriating as the one that had driven him out here. For years, his artificial body had required neither sustenance nor sleep. His mind, on the other hand, like his carved heart, remained as dependent as ever. Even he had to rest every few days, just for an hour or two. A necessary inconvenience, and an inescapable reminder of his failure to become truly perfect. 

In hindsight, perhaps he should have foreseen the magnitude of his failure before it inevitably caught up to him with iron fists and a bleeding heart. 

“Tch.” 

Sasori got to his feet and peered through the gloom. No matter how deeply he explored, there seemed to be no end to this place. Except back the way he had come. Inevitably, inexorably, all paths led back to that clearing, to the ruins of spirits long lost to this place. Back to her. 

Blue sap as dark as pitch oozed from the porous timber of his chosen tree. It filled the veiny leaves in the canopy, seeped into the soil and the spotted mushroom caps that sprouted among the roots. They say royal blood runs blue, but Sasori had only ever seen such in the most primeval of creatures that lurked in musty shadows and stagnant waters. 

He wondered.

If he peeled back his skin, what would pour out of him? 

A sharp pain pulled him from his thoughts, and he realized he was unknowingly digging his chakra strings into the sinewy flesh of his open palm. He retracted them immediately before they could pierce the skin and clutched his hand, disturbed at his own lack of control.

_“This is a sacred place,”_ Sakura had warned him. 

_A mad place._

Sasori curled his lip in defiance and slashed his palm with this chakra strings. The pain was sharp and focused and entirely his. The body remembered. 

Red blood bubbled up between the lips of his torn flesh. He watched it seep triumphant between his fingers and drip onto the bone-white branch, absorbing into the pores. A small victory, and an empty one. 

Silver-grey light filtered through the canopy now. It was getting late. He was tired of the silence that dwelled here like a sleeping giant, of how small he was rendered by comparison.

Ignoring the annoying sting in his ruined hand, Sasori took off at a run over the tree branches, heedless of his direction and the simmering fury he had become too good at swallowing whole. 

They would both lead him back to her, anyway. 

* * *

 

Sakura was preparing a simple dinner when she felt Sasori’s presence creep up on her like a cold draft. Unconsciously, she tensed her muscles in anticipation of an attack she was logically certain wasn’t coming, but wouldn’t see even if it was. 

She didn’t turn to greet him as he hovered in the crumbling doorway.

“You must be hungry,” she said as she continued to chop vegetables and dump them in an old clay pot to stew. 

He said nothing, but she could feel him watching her. Sakura forced herself to finish chopping the gourd she was working on before she set aside her kunai and faced him. 

Only then did he turn from her. “Tell me when it’s done.”

Sakura stared at the empty doorway, aghast. Who did he think he was to be making such demands? Not that she expected him to help with something as trivial as preparing food. Not that she expected him to know _how_ to make food, considering he probably hadn’t eaten anything in years.

“Jerk,” she muttered. 

Perhaps it was for the best. Something told her that Sasori, in all his obdurate perfectionism, would be a real pain to deal with in the kitchen. She braced herself for his rude criticism when she brought the pot of stew outside and served two bowls. He said nothing as he tasted it. 

Sakura absently pushed the vegetables around in her clay bowl. “It’s bland, but it’s food. You’ll just have to deal with it until I can find something that isn’t poisonous to add a little flavor.”

He chewed. “It’s fine.”

They lapsed into silence as they ate. As surreal as it was for her to be sharing a meal with Sasori, of all people, Sakura didn’t trust herself not to say something that might set off his anger again. Next time, he may not feel so inclined to rein it in. 

They sat in a patch of flattened grass around a cold fire pit with nothing but the pyreflies for company. Moonlight found cracks in the canopy through which it slipped its pale light. Sakura imagined silver fingers curling around veiny bars, pushing to get in past the thick leaves. Somehow, the white canopy strengthened the moonlight, diffusing it across broad, white leaves like mirrors, and cast the ruins in a strange, crystalline haze. 

A primordial rumbling reached them from deep in the forest. A gurgling, strangled sound, like an underwater scream. Both Sasori and Sakura froze to listen, but it was gone as abruptly as it had come. The silence it left behind was as deafening as it was enormous. 

Sakura was about to say something reassuring, more to assuage herself than Sasori, but it was then that she noticed his hand. “Hey, your hand is bleeding.”

Sasori slowly pulled his gaze from the inky depths of the forest to look upon her. He curled his wounded hand out of sight. In the mirrored moonlight, his face was shadowed and cut, uninviting. “You only just noticed?”

She narrowed her eyes. “You could have said something.”

“To what end?”

If he were anyone else, she may have snapped at him for his childish defiance. Instead, she set aside her empty stew bowl and held out her hand. “Let me see it.”

She thought he would refuse. The last time she’d touched him, she’d ended up pinned to the wall and almost strangled to death. When he offered his hand without a fuss, she wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or suspicious. 

“These cuts are clean,” she said more to herself than to him. His hand was cool to the touch, and she was careful not to aggravate the inflamed skin around his cuts as she poured healing chakra into them. “Where did you get a blade?”

“I didn’t.”

Okay, so they were playing that game. That was fine with Sakura; she didn’t care, anyway. She was far more transfixed by the feel of his hand in hers. Flesh and bone, veins full of blood, and a steady pulse of chakra. It occurred to her that this was the first touch they had ever shared that wasn’t violent in nature. 

She retracted her hand at the thought, frowning. Of course, he noticed. 

“You despise me even now,” he said. There was something contemplative about this tone, not a question but not quite a statement, either. 

Sakura looked at him oddly. “That’s not what I was…” She bit her tongue. “Why wouldn’t I despise you?”

“It’s been three years.”

“You say that like I should let it go.”

“And yet, you haven’t.” He leaned forward over his lap and folded his hands. “Why?”

Sakura wasn’t sure if this was a dream or if he was honestly asking her something so obvious. “Because you murdered Gaara and countless other Sand shinobi. You’re the reason Chiyo is dead. Have you forgotten?”

“No, have you?”

Sakura had a nasty retort on the tip of her tongue, but she held it back. That cold tone, the look in his eyes… It was just like before.

“You’re angry,” she said, hating how soft her voice had fallen. “Why?”

He watched her carefully, and each second that passed with her question left unanswered was a second closer to something she knew she would not be able to control. If he turned on her…

At some point, without thinking, Sakura had grabbed a kunai and now clutched it hard enough to snap. Sasori’s gaze fell to her white-knuckled grip on the knife briefly before meeting her eyes again. “When did you become so meek?”

Of all the things that might have set him off, this was the last thing Sakura expected. “I… What?”

He uncoiled like a spider emerging from its nest and rose to his feet. “Even if you blow off my limbs or paralyze me with poison, I’ll definitely get you.”

Sakura stared up at him in genuine shock. Those words…

_My words._

_Why does he remember my words?_

“Bold words for such a little girl,” he said. “I wonder what happened to her?”

_She’s here,_ Sakura wanted to say. _She’s right here, you bastard._

But the words would not come, and all she could do was shrink under his penetrating glare. 

His swords cut her deep.

“So, I’m not the only one who died in that decrepit cave,” he said venomously. 

But his words cut deeper still.

_Get up._

_Get_ up _, Sakura._

“That’s not—”

The pyreflies danced in between them, each one a cold, bitter kiss upon her bare shoulders. He regarded her like she wasn’t really there at all. 

But she was there, she was right there. Still alive after all this time. And that…

That had always been the problem. 

“You have no idea what I’ve been through, what I’ve lost. You don’t know me.”

Sakura was sure in that moment that if he wasn’t so painfully indifferent he would have laughed in her face. Never had she imagined she would wish for Sasori’s ire as though her life, her sanity depended on it. But the part of Sakura that remembered how to be brave knew she didn’t deserve it.

“No,” he said at length, easy and smooth. “I don’t know you at all.”

There was no stopping him when he left. No point. 

Sakura didn’t even try.

And she wasn’t sure which part hurt more.

* * *

 

That day, the sun was scorching hot, the sky a washed-out blue with few clouds. The kind of sky that was wasted on Sakura.

She’d been alone, but not for long. The Memorial Stone was both the loneliest and the busiest place in Konoha, especially these days. Nagato had promised pain, and he had delivered.

Sakura wasn’t sure why today. There was nothing special about today that separated it from all the other days she’d come here with a prayer to gods she didn’t believe in, who’d never done anything worth remembering. The ones worth remembering were all here. 

“I’ve been coming here for so long, you’d think I’d be used to it by now.” Ino traced over the neat stonework spelling out Asuma’s name. When her fingers passed over Shizune’s name, she lingered. “It’s rough.”

It would be, Sakura thought. Time and touch would smooth out the memories and the rough-hewn edges alike, until they melted into the stone to join the ones that had come before. But she said nothing as she ran her own fingers over Kakashi’s entry near the bottom.

_“Sorry I’m late.”_

It was such a beautiful day.

“Sakura?” Ino laid a hand on her shoulder. Blue eyes watched her with concern, with love.

“Do you ever feel like you’re dwelling in the past?” Sakura asked. “Like it’s just…so _close_.”

Ino looked at her a long time. “I never liked that turn of phrase, ‘dwelling in the past’.” She let her hand fall away from the Memorial Stone. “It’s so permanent, dwelling. Like a home, or a haunting. Ghosts dwell; the rest of us have to learn to keep moving.”

_Is that what we are?_

_Ghosts clinging to names set in stone?_

“You _will_ learn,” Ino said with the quiet conviction of someone who already has. 

After all, there was a difference between remembering those who were gone and dwelling forlornly among their ghosts. 

_“Sakura… Thank you.”_

Sakura closed her eyes and imagined the names carved upon her heart, some freshly bleeding, others scarred deep. Faceless and far away, save for the phantoms she couldn’t leave alone.

“Yeah.”

* * *

 

Moonlight and melancholy.

It’s cold when he leaves.

What is the heart, anyway? That she would so easily give it to one who would break it is a testament to its fragility, and to her carelessness. But those are his cracks she cradles in her ribcage. In bone and sinew, she holds him together, though he never once asked her to. 

_“Sakura… Thank you.”_

They say drowning is peaceful before it kills you.

* * *

 

It was still dark when Sakura woke with a sharp, deep breath. She clutched her throat, momentarily stricken with a sense of suffocation. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she sat up in bed. Her cheeks were damp with fresh tears, though she could not remember shedding them. Bone tired, she nonetheless slipped out of bed. 

Pyreflies floated around her, gauzy and golden. She made her way to the kitchen and the water basin there. The dream continued to haunt her from the corners of the room, but the cold water helped. She scrubbed her face nearly raw and hovered there a moment, letting the sting settle. 

Outside, the moon must have passed behind a cloud. It was darker than before, and only the pyreflies illuminated her path through bone-white grass and creeping, violet vines. Despite the humid heat, Sakura shivered and rubbed her bare arms for warmth. 

Sasori was in the same tree as before, one leg dangling over the edge, his eyes closed. For a moment, Sakura thought he might be asleep, but she knew better. A feeling, maybe. A premonition. 

Even so, she lingered, watching him. He was beautiful, captivatingly so. She’d never thought of him as anything other than a cursed villain, as monstrous in his facsimile of feeling as he was tragic. But something about this preternatural place agreed with him.

Sakura thought about Kakashi and Shizune and all the others who had been slaughtered by Pein. She thought about Naruto training far away, pouring his blood, sweat, and tears into getting stronger for the sake of those who still remained. She thought of Sasuke, too. She always thought of Sasuke. 

“What do you want, Sakura?” Sasori asked, his eyes still closed.

There was not much she wanted, truly. Only… Only to learn, as Tsunade had promised her, and as Ino had implored her. To learn to let go, to heal, to keep moving. She was so tired of haunting those who could not see her dwelling there, who had never cared to look.

“I want to wake up,” she said. 

Sasori opened his eyes and peered down at her. In this quiet light, he almost looked sad. “And?”

“And…”

She closed her eyes. 

“And I need your help.”

Three years gone, and she was still in that cave. 

And the sight of him in the heat of his rage and hers…

She opened her eyes to find him still watching her, and she’d never felt so exposed. But then, no one had ever looked at her the way Sasori did, like she was the best and the worst of god’s creations. 

“Why would I help you?” he asked.

_Because you did it once before._

But Sakura still had her pride, after all. 

“Because you’re still here.”

He didn’t move from his perch, and Sakura didn’t move from hers. The pyreflies fell about them, stars at the end of time with nothing left to burn for but memories. Sasori snared one in his strings, lured it close. 

“And in return?”

Sakura bit her lip. What could someone like her ever give to someone like him? What would he even value?

_“I’ll waste my words for you, too,”_ his ever-present phantom whispered. 

Sasori settled back against the trunk with a low chuckle while she warred with herself, the delicate pyrefly still ensnared between his fingers. “Go back to sleep, Sakura.”

She did, though she hardly remembered her retreat back to her bed, back to slumber. 

Back to dreaming.

* * *

 

In a place where future is past and ghosts dwell among us, maybe…

.

.

.

_Maybe I could waste something precious for him, too._


	3. You'd Hold Me Till My Heart Was Numb

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Casually bumping that rating to M…
> 
>  
> 
> [Inspiration](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHKxRwrYFaw)

Sakura did not specify how exactly she wanted him to help her, and Sasori didn’t ask. Neither of them, he suspected, quite understood this journey, only that they were on it together.

They sat quietly finishing up breakfast. Sasori tossed his apple core aside and regarded her. Inevitably, his gaze was drawn to that vibrant pink hair that clashed with both the lifeless pallor of this place and her blood-red vest. Watching her like this as she deftly peeled the blackened skin of her apple with a kunai, he could almost believe it was really her, just as he remembered. 

_“What do you think a human life is?”_

Her question branded him like fire, a burning he had never quite been able to shake. 

_“Nothing but an illusion,”_ Orochimaru promised him once, long ago. _“This disgusting, liminal existence… I reject it.”_

Sakura looked up at him then, her green eyes made inhumanly luminous in the muted, indigo sunlight. A mere trick of the light, though it arrested him all the same. 

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “This place… It’s more than just a forest.”

Sasori decided to humor her. “And?”

She sat up a little straighter. “And I feel, like…” She flexed her fist. “Like something’s waiting for us. Me,” she corrected quickly. 

Sasori studied the tension in her shoulders, the wide-set watchfulness in her eyes. 

_“Good things come to those who wait, Sasori.”_

He swallowed the bitter bile in his throat and rose to his feet. “Then what are you still doing here?”

It came out harsher than he’d intended, and she noticed. Sasori closed his eyes, willing the sudden surge of anger to calm. 

_Sloppy._

Orochimaru was not here, and Sasori was no longer beholden to his vows and venom. 

Sakura chose to ignore the tone of his admonishment. “I don’t know.”

She looked at him, and for a moment they were trapped. He _felt_ it, the weight of it, caging them together like animals. And he wondered about the ghosts to whom she herself was beholden. If she warred with them as he did, clung to them as he did. 

“I want to find it,” she said, drawing upon some quiet conviction he had hardly seen from her until now.

Sasori had the sudden bizarre urge to touch her, to prove it was no illusion. 

_“What do you think a human life is?”_

He quashed the capricious impulse and curled his fingers into a tight fist. “Then let’s go.”

* * *

 

Sakura was beginning to doubt her impulsive plan to explore the far reaches of the Shikkotsu Forest. She couldn’t say why she had proposed the excursion considering how poorly things had gone for her the last time she wandered here. Only…

_“When did you become so meek?”_

It should not have mattered to her, but it did. What he thought of her had always mattered. And Sakura was starting to wonder if he wasn’t the only one here who did not recognize her anymore. 

So she packed as much food and water as she could comfortably carry and set off into the gloom with Sasori after the parade of pyreflies. There was a kind of thrill in exploring the unknown that almost trumped her fear of it. She felt proactive, purposeful in a way no amount of meditation and introspection could match. And this time, she wasn’t alone in these woods. 

The canopy above blocked most of the afternoon sunlight, and that which filtered through was tinted a hazy greyish-white. The leaves reminded her of an old woman’s skin, filmy flesh devoid of substance save for the fat, spidering veins that slowly pulsed with life’s last dregs. The stench of poison was acrid in her nose, yet suffocatingly saccharine upon her tongue when she tasted the air. It was far stronger out here in the wilderness than it was back in the purified clearing. 

And yet, life flourished even here. She paused to take a drink of water from the skin and leaned her tired body against a thick trunk encircled by delicate, floppy mushrooms, as though marching on command. Their deep violet stems appeared almost black beneath stark white caps. 

Fairy rings, Ino called them. The mushrooms sprouted in succession, little soldiers holding the line. To step inside the ring could bring good fortune or disaster depending on the tale and the one telling it. Sakura kneeled down and discovered that the mushrooms were surprisingly silken to the touch. 

_Fortune or disaster?_ she wondered. 

A cold finger brushed against hers, and she gasped at the sight of a tiny slug curling around her knuckle from beneath the mushroom she had touched. It was no longer than a couple inches, as white as the rest of this place with a long, violet stripe down its back. Tiny eyestalks swiveled in her direction. 

Unbidden, Sakura’s eyes filled with tears at the sight of the small creature, the first sentient being she had encountered in this dead, dreary place besides Sasori. 

Silently, she sensed him behind her crouching down to peer at the slug over her shoulder. Neither of them spoke as Sakura lifted the tiny slug to better see it. 

“Hello, little one,” she said, unable to control her smile or her tears. 

The slug did not speak, but its eyestalks fixed upon her face. Sakura sensed an acute intelligence in the creature, small as it was. Day after day she had toiled in these woods—why had she seen nothing of its fabled inhabitants until now? What did it mean?

“Leave it alone,” Sasori said. 

She sniffled and caught his eye. “Don’t you want to…?”

His eyes were fixed upon the tiny slug, his jaw tense. “Just set it down, Sakura. We should leave.”

Confused, she nonetheless heeded his odd warning. Sasori was rarely ill at ease, or at least he rarely showed it, but something about the way he watched that slug gave her pause. 

“All right, down you go.” Sakura gently returned the slug to the mushroom from which she had retrieved it. Eerily, it seemed to watch her as she rose and wiped her hand on her skirt. 

Sasori did not wait for her before setting off again, and she had no choice but to hurry after him before he left her behind.

* * *

 

They made camp near a stream, and if Sakura closed her eyes, she could imagine she was back in Konoha listening to the Naka River that wended around the outskirts of the village. A few summers ago, before Pein, she and Naruto and Sai had spent the afternoon swimming and taking in the sun after a hard morning of drills. Even Yamato and Kakashi had joined them for a bit, all of them content to relax for just a few precious hours before duty called them back. Naruto had picked her up and jumped into the frigid water over her squawking protests, soaking them both. No one had ever looked so happy to eat a fistful of water in retaliation. 

But when she opened her eyes, there were only pyreflies sinking into the blighted waters, dark with rotten algae. Purple moss dusted the banks and cushioned her seat, downy yet damp. Sasori was rummaging in the satchel he’d brought for his water skin. 

“You were wary of it,” Sakura said as she stared into the river’s depths. “Why?”

Sasori ceased his search and loomed behind her. She could feel his eyes on her back, and she tightened her hold on her folded knees. 

“For a medical ninja, you have a laughable sense of self-preservation.”

She glared at him over her shoulder. “It meant us no harm.”

“Are you so sure?”

She knew he was trying to make her feel like an idiot on purpose, but she’d be damned if she gave him the satisfaction when he couldn’t _know_. “It was the first sign of life I’ve seen in this place. That has to mean something.”

“Of course it means something,” he snapped. 

Sakura got to her feet to face him at her full height. “And you know, is that it?” She took a threatening step toward him. “What is it you think you know?”

“Clearly nothing you would listen to.”

“Hey, you agreed to help me, so by all means, _enlighten_ me.”

“Stubborn woman.” He closed his eyes momentarily as if to get his bearings. “You’re meddling with something you don’t fully understand.”

She drew closer, unafraid in her anger. Who did he think he was? “How would you know?”

“Because you refuse to let yourself.”

Sakura flinched. His scrutiny carried the weight of truth, and not without judgment. 

“I’ve seen this before. Once, a long time ago.” He showed her his profile, as if it pained him to look upon her directly. “I was with Orochimaru when he journeyed to the Ryuichi Cave.”

Sakura was stunned silent as she processed that. She imagined a much younger Sasori, still a child under the tutelage of one already too far gone from this world and its wonders. It was common knowledge that he had joined Akatsuki very young and partnered with the legendary Sannin. She thought of Sasuke and how he, too, had abandoned his home and loved ones to chase after that same myth of a man. 

In that moment, irrationally, Sakura hated Orochimaru. Not because he had forced fate, no; Sasuke and Sasori had made their choices long ago, and they would live and die shackled to them. No, she hated the allure of him. The _greed_. The venom that beckoned—gravitational, celestial, a cosmic draw from which even the best were not immune. Even Tsunade could not resist him, even after all these years. Sakura had caught her on several occasions cradling his picture the way she would cradle Jiraiya’s, quietly dwelling.

“Someone like him could never be worthy,” Sasori said.

“Someone like him.” 

“Afraid.” 

Sakura balked at the insinuation. “I’m _nothing_ like Orochimaru.”

Something in the way he watched her changed, as though he were finally seeing her standing there for the first time. The fury he kept quietly hidden bled out of him then, and it was all Sakura could do to hold her ground. 

“Aren’t you?”

_“When did you become so meek?”_

Chakra flooded her fists and anger boiled beneath her skin recalling his trenchant words. Somehow, he always knew exactly what to say to cut straight to her heart. “Take it back.”

Sasori flexed his agile fingers. Golden chakra sparked at their tips in search of something to strangle. “No.”

“Take it _back_!” 

Sakura threw a reckless fist at his face, but he easily deflected her with his chakra strings and sent her stumbling into a tree. The white bark splintered under her enhanced strength but didn’t shatter. Like hitting a brick wall at terminal velocity, she felt the seismic impact full-body. Disoriented, her head swam and her body shook. 

But she was too pissed off to care. 

Sasori crouched in a defensive stance, his expression infuriatingly impassive in a way that invited bad memories. They said nothing to each other as they let whatever tenuous understanding cultivated between them hang in the balance, paper-thin. 

_Fuck it._

With a threatening growl, Sakura ran at him again. Her fists were flying, two neon streaks in the twilight gloom, punching and pounding and never landing their mark, he was too fast. But Sakura had three years on him now, and even without Chiyo to back her up, she wasn’t going to let him push her around. 

She feinted left and kicked at his knees. Maybe he was out of practice or simply underestimating her, but he grunted on contact and rolled into the water. Chakra pulled him up and out, and he didn’t waste a moment. Sakura did not expect him to. When he snared a decaying tree trunk overgrown with moss in his strings and threw it at her, she was ready for him. 

The crunch of rotten wood under her bare knuckles was almost as satisfying as the look in his eyes, watching her watching him. No one had ever admired her power the way Sasori did, and it ignited something in her that she hadn’t felt for a very long time. Something in the air between them shifted, something they each inevitably recognized in the other.

A lichen-infested boulder was her next opponent, and Sakura flung herself at it with abandon as she chased him. 

“You call yourself a woman with that unnatural strength?” he said as he caught himself on a high branch with his strings and pulled his body higher to safety. 

The old taunt only inflamed Sakura’s passion recalling the last time they’d danced this particular number, and she eagerly launched herself into the air after him. “Oh Sasori, I’m just getting started!”

Far above her, he bared his teeth in a smirk. “Show me.”

Sakura watched his clever fingers and let his tells guide her movements just like they had three years ago. And she could smell it—the damp stone, the blood, splintered pine, cold steel, and vile venom. Three years gone in a heartbeat, and they were back to where they had begun. 

He dodged her frenetic punches even this high up, used the thick canopy and tangling network of branches to distance and disorient. But Sakura was undeterred. She snapped a gnarled branch sturdy enough to hold a man’s weight and hurled it at him like a javelin. Sasori’s eyes widened in shock as he reached his strings for the abundant canopy, and it came crashing down upon him. 

Sakura barely had any time to wonder at his fate when directly above her, the canopy collapsed on her, too. Heavy branches and leaves pummeled her mercilessly, and she fell to the forest floor. A branch broke her fall until her fall broke it, and she landed in the grass and mulch with a thud and a terrible ache in her back. 

“Damnit,” she swore, pushing herself up on her hands and knees. 

_Where is he?_

She got her answer moments later when she felt the very air tighten around her. Golden chakra strings squeezed her tightly, and no matter how she struggled, she could not escape their control. 

Sasori dropped down from above and roughly reeled her in. Sakura ate a mouthful of dead leaves and sputtered as she struggled on the ground and glared up at him. He had the nerve to take a knee and grasp her chin in his fingers to better look at her. 

“You’re one hell of a girl,” he said softly, knowingly. This close and she could smell the exertion and adrenaline on him, the dangerous thrill of the game they indulged. Caught up in the kinetic web of memories, he could not seem to resist luring her in closer. “But I wonder… How long can you last like this?”

Sakura didn’t know how or why they had ended up here again. Alive with power and memories and longing, she couldn’t be sure if it was all a dream or if they truly were still in that cave, still fighting for the right to exist in a world that would never give them the chance unless they hoarded it for themselves. 

He ran his thumb over her bottom lip, bruising, infantilizing. “Come on, Sakura.” His strings tightened sinfully. “Show me.”

The spark he’d lit caught and blazed to life under his catalyzing touch. Three years gone, and she wasn’t the no-name little girl who needed Chiyo to guide her punches anymore. “You should know my temperament by now.”

“Oh?” That damn _condescending_ smirk.

Sakura’s chakra was a living, writhing animal within her, and it clawed at her skin to get out. The Yin seal on her forehead screamed, and her shroud of pyreflies swelled. “I really hate to lose!”

A storm of adrenaline and chakra and pure life energy broke and Sakura’s blood sang as she pushed back on Sasori’s chakra strings, those immortal threads that could control anyone even against their will. They bit into her flesh, hooked on her bones, but still she flourished. Sasori pulled back just as she burst and shredded his strings to stardust. 

Pale ribbons of enchanted chakra criss-crossed her skin over the paths his strings had taken, healing their stinging bite, and it felt magnificent. This power…there was nothing like it, and it was all hers. Sakura grinned and let herself feel it seeping out of her skin, harden it to steel. For a blinding, blissful moment, she was invincible.

Sasori watched her a few paces away, and when they locked eyes, Sakura shuddered. Gone was the fury he had so often directed toward her since his reanimation, and the obvious disdain he’d always harbored since their fateful encounter in the cave. There was nothing left but the raw intensity of his focus solely on her, as if she were not quite real but he had no choice but to believe in her, anyway. It was the same look as when she’d smashed his Third Kazekage puppet, when she’d taken the sword meant for Chiyo, when she’d punched him and pleaded with him to _wake up_ and see what was right there in front of him all along. 

Except…

“Sasori…”

He averted his gaze, and the unmistakable carnal heat along with it. Sakura had to bite her tongue to stifle a whimper at the loss of it. 

“I take it back.” He looked up at her again, the cold, imperious façade of control back in place. “You’re nothing like Orochimaru.”

Sakura gaped at him, at a loss for words as her feverish emotions got the better of her. The white ribbons on her skin receded back to the tiny Yin seal on her forehead, once more dormant and cold. Like a lightning strike, the passion was gone as suddenly as it had manifested, and they were left to burn in its wake. 

Sasori dusted himself off, frowning at the state of his dirty shirt. Before she knew it, he was walking away. 

“Wait!” Sakura ran after him and grabbed his hand without thinking. 

He paused and glanced at their clasped hands. Then he looked directly at her. 

“Thank you,” she said, meaning it. “I… I didn’t know how much I needed that.”

She tightened her grip on his hand, willing him to understand. 

“I’m going to clean up,” he said evenly. 

Sakura let him go. 

* * *

 

The thing about being reborn was that he would have to die first. 

That was entirely the point, Sasori thought. 

“It’s not about rebirth,” Orochimaru said, his breath ragged as he clutched the bleeding puncture wounds in his belly. “It’s about transcendence.”

Sasori fought to keep his eyes open against the concussion pulling him under as he checked their six for signs of pursuit. 

“They won’t follow us,” Orochimaru said, settling against the ancient tree under which they’d stopped for a brief respite. “They’re beholden to that place, just as much as it is to Them.”

Sasori didn’t bother masking his irritation with his new partner. “You stole from Them.”

A rare cholera twisted Orochimaru’s slender features. “I took what was rightfully mine.”

As if to prove his point, Orochimaru retrieved his prize from the sack at his hip, heedless of his still-bleeding wounds. The white serpent squirmed in his hold, but so long as Orochimaru held it by the head, it had no recourse to use its deadly fangs. Golden eyes fixed on Sasori, intelligent but helpless. 

Without warning, Orochimaru opened his mouth and swallowed the wriggling serpent whole. Sasori’s stomach wrenched at the sight of the creature’s tail wiggling past Orochimaru’s white lips. Stunned and horrified, all he could do was watch as Orochimaru quickly became sick. Thrashing violently, he fell to his knees and clawed at his neck. Sasori restrained him with his strings before he could tear his own throat out. 

“Orochimaru!” 

It was times like this that Sasori was reminded of how painfully vulnerable he really was. Fifteen and alone in the world save for the man who had been callously assigned as his guardian and partner, he entertained the crippling thought of what he would do if Orochimaru perished here after they’d miraculously managed to escape the Ryuichi Cave with their lives.

Cursing, Sasori forced Orochimaru’s mouth open. “I’m going to pull it out before it eats you alive.”

He plunged his chakra threads down Orochimaru’s throat, searching for the snake, and felt something reach back. Orochimaru’s eyes rolled so far back in his head that only the ghastly whites were visible now. Sasori tried not to look at them and pulled. 

What emerged was not the stolen serpent, but pale fingers and a hand. Sasori launched back, his head spinning with nausea and his worsening concussion. His strings yanked back with him, pulling out an arm, a shoulder, and a head of matted black hair. Orochimaru’s jaw cracked and split, his neck peeled, and from within the grotesque husk, he emerged anew. 

Coughing, the pale Sannin brushed his damp hair from his eyes and looked down at himself, naked as the day he was born. 

“Hey,” Sasori said in a voice he barely recognized. 

Orochimaru ignored him as he got to his shaky feet, careless of his modesty as he examined his own hands like he was seeing them for the first time. “Incredible. This power…”

He looked down at his former body, nothing but a boneless heap of shed skin and soiled clothes. The wounds he had received during their escape remained, but his new body was as perfect as a newborn’s. His laughter began as a low rumble deep in his belly, but soon it burst from him like an exorcism, full-body and hysterical. 

Sasori could only stare in disbelief at the truth right in front of him. Stolen power was still power, after all. In their world, it was all that mattered. 

Orochimaru pulled the bloody Akatsuki coat off his broken husk and donned it. “Now who’s worthy?” he muttered to himself, golden eyes unfocused. 

_Not you._

But Sasori kept his mouth shut and his eyes open as Orochimaru led their retreat back to basecamp. No matter how the older man justified it, however, Sasori knew they were fleeing. It was this thought, perhaps more than anything, that shamed him. 

It was that very night, as a storm raged beyond the walls and Sasori sucked down as much coffee as he could stand to stay awake through his concussion, that he began work on what would become his new body. 

A thousand deaths would be most welcome for the chance to be truly reborn.

* * *

 

Isn’t it all a farce? 

To rend flesh and crush bones, just to feel the touch of another? 

She feels his touch twist deeper in her ribcage, and she wonders if this is what they mean by a kiss of steel.

_“My collection isn’t just about quantity, you see.”_

Long fingers part her lips, and his steel kisses her again. 

_“Quality is just as important.”_

Her tears are sweet on her tongue. 

* * *

 

Sakura woke overheated with a dull ache in her back. Groaning, she eased her pain with a bit of chakra and swallowed the salty remnants of her dream. She sometimes dreamed of her time fighting Sasori in the cave all those years ago, and every nightmare left her drained and unsettled upon waking. This one was no different, except…

Her fingers found his scar just below her ribs, the raised flesh smooth to the touch. Her skin felt hot, alive. She imagined his sword sliding past her parting flesh, sinking deep and deadly and hot, and she shuddered at the phantom that didn’t feel quite like pain. She bit her bottom lip and winced at the tender bruise he’d left when he handled her yesterday. 

“Sakura,” he called to her.

Sakura startled where she lay. Her cheeks flared at the sight of herself with her hand halfway under her shirt and her lip caught between her teeth. Mad with a shame only she could see since he wasn’t in view, she nonetheless sprang to her feet and smoothed her clothes. Her heart pounded. The forest’s noxious air coated her lungs like syrup. 

_Calm down_ , she willed herself. _It was just…_

Just this place, surely. The air alone had to be affecting her senses no matter how careful she was with her body. The idea that she had just entertained an erotic fantasy about the man who once tried to kill her was just…

_Mad._

_This is a mad place._

“Are you just going to stand there all day?” Sasori leaned against a nearby tree looking bored, as usual. 

Sakura snapped to attention a little too quickly and felt all the blood rush to her head. Groaning, she ran her fingers through her hair to help it pass. “No, sorry. I’ll be ready to go in just a few minutes.”

They took to the trees not long after, opting to eat in transit. He ran ahead of her, his strides long and efficient, and Sakura couldn’t help but wonder at how surreal this all was. She recalled the first time she’d ever laid eyes on Sasori, hidden in his hunchbacked puppet Hiruko, slow and ungainly. To hear him tell it, he hadn’t fought without the monstrous contraption for years before their fight. What must it have been like for him to see the world through the slatted eyes of a dead thing? What did he see now?

They didn’t speak much as they journeyed, which suited Sakura fine, lost as she was to her own demons and unwilling to share them with him. Perhaps he was thinking something similar as he gazed off into space while they stopped for a midday meal by a still lake. Sakura pulled off her boots and pressed her bare toes to the velvety purple moss along the banks. She looked longingly at the water. 

“I’m going to take a bath,” she announced. 

Sasori rolled his eyes. “By all means, take your time.”

“It’s not like we have anywhere specific to be.”

Which, while technically true, was not specifically true. While they had set off from the ruins with no designs on a particular destination, Sakura nonetheless felt the pull of the forest guiding her steps, like magnetism. She said nothing of it to Sasori, worried he would think her irrational or silly, but when he held her gaze just now, she suspected he felt it, too. 

“I won’t be long,” she said softly, already shedding her red vest and fiddling with the clasp on her mesh undershirt. 

Sasori silently rose and took to the trees out of sight, perhaps to give her some privacy. Sakura’s eyes lingered where he’d disappeared among the leaves, and she bit her lip. 

_Stop it._

Determined not to think about him as she undressed, she quickly dumped her clothes on the dry grass and waded into the deep, dark water. It was cold when it kissed her skin, but the bite was a blessing in this stifling humidity. Sighing, Sakura dunked her head and scrubbed her body as best she could. 

She waded out a bit where white lily pads as broad as beds floated among fleshy, blue water lilies, their petals curled black at the ends as though scorched. But their scent was sweet, overpoweringly so. Sakura clung to a lily pad by a flower as wide as a boulder and wondered at the terrible allure of this place. 

_Death in full bloom._

“So beautiful,” she whispered as she dared to run her fingers over the lily’s long petals.

When a black snail with a pearly, indigo shell as large as Sakura’s head slipped out of the folds, she was too arrested to be surprised. The creature’s eye stalks trained quietly on her, and she held its gaze. An alien but powerful instinct told her to show deference, and so she bowed her head. The snail returned the courtesy, and Sakura was taken with a childlike joy. 

She felt more than heard the eldritch roar of the forest crash like an avalanche, and she covered her mouth to stifle a scream. The snail averted its eye stalks across the lake, unperturbed, and Sakura could only watch as _something_ erupted from the gloom. Something that shook the ancient trees like children quaking in their winter boots.

A splash landed next to her, Sakura looked up just as Sasori yanked her bodily out of the water and onto the lily pad behind him. His pyreflies shrouded him in a veil of gold, and his fingers sparkled with potent chakra. He didn’t even look at her, unconcerned with her nakedness as he fixated completely on the presence approaching too fast to reconcile the force of its movement. Neither of them said a word, and his bruising grip on her arm barely registered when she saw, finally…

A colossal slug slithered out of the forest along the opposite bank of the lake. It was as bone white as the trees that whined as they parted to pass its massive girth. Eye stalks taller than a man stretched and swiveled to survey the area, to see _them_. 

It had to be thirty, maybe forty feet long. The inky, violet stripes along its back sweat poisonous fumes that merged with the air. For whatever reason, it stopped in its tracks and simply watched Sakura and Sasori, lording. 

Sakura felt Sasori’s grip on her arm tighten painfully. His jaw was set so tightly he might shatter his teeth. She felt it, too. The danger, mortal and manic. It burned her eyes and his, drawing tears. 

Nearby, the purple-shelled snail watched them, too. Waiting. Sakura took a shuddering breath and really hoped she would not die here in the nude with no one to mourn her. 

Slowly, so as not to spook the Ancient One, she snaked her fingers through Sasori’s hair, gripped it firmly, and leaned close enough to whisper, “Bow.”

She didn’t wait for his acquiescence and forced his head down, bending hers, as well. And she prayed. 

His breathing and hers were her only indication of the time passing in utter, deafening silence. Until she chanced a look up. The slug slowly bent its meaty head to her, swiveled its enormous eye stalks, and crawled off back into the forest. Despite the harrowing encounter, Sakura couldn’t help but smile in accomplishment. Of what, she did not truly understand, but it felt…right. It felt _true_.

Without warning, she burst out laughing, her elation getting away from her, and it broke the tense spell that had settled over Sasori and her. He jerked, as though awakened from a trance, and Sakura felt her balance teeter. Too fast to avoid, they both lost control of their chakra and went tumbling into the water. 

When Sakura surfaced and wiped the moisture from her eyes, Sasori was coughing as he clung to the lily pad. 

“Surprisingly, you take direction well,” Sakura said before she could help herself. 

He glared absolute murder at her behind his wet bangs, and it took everything in her willpower not to laugh again.

* * *

 

They waited a couple hours for Sasori’s clothes to dry out, and then they were on their way again. Sasori was not above admitting that he did not care to linger around the lake now that they knew the Ancient Ones frequented it with some regularity.

He thought about asking Sakura how she knew that a sign of deference would assuage the creature, but decided against it. This place called to her, as it called to him in its way. To try to understand it was a useless effort. Better to focus on what he could accomplish with his own hands. 

Those hands were restless now as they proceeded at a sedate pace overland. He itched to dig a kunai into soft flesh, rework bone and sinew, paint over full, rouged lips.

“Sasori?”

Sakura was watching him thoughtfully, her eyes dark in the gloom and the fog that had crept up on them like a rising tide. The pyreflies were even more formless in the mist, their glow muted like candlelight. There was no moon tonight, only shadows. 

His eyes dropped to her bare arm, where a hand-shaped bruise was forming. He had the sudden, selfish urge to touch it, see if she might shy from the pain. She was saying something, but he didn’t catch it. “What was that?”

She regarded him. “I was asking if you would tell me about Orochimaru.”

He stopped, and she paused to look back at him. Green eyes held his, a quiet conviction newly revived that had not been there before, before their fight, before the memories overcame them. He was not one to gamble unless he was sure he could win, but with Sakura, there seemed to be little resisting. 

_“I’ll make you tell me about Orochimaru if it’s the last thing I do!”_

If it was not patently absurd, he might suspect this morbid place to have a sense of humor. In a way, Orochimaru was the reason for it all, then and now. The reason for them. It all came back to him.

_Perhaps you truly have become immortal, old friend._

“You said you went to the Ryuichi Cave with him,” Sakura said. 

Sasori narrowed his eyes. Orochimaru was suddenly the last thing he wanted to discuss with her, of all people. He pushed past her deeper into the fog. “I did say that.”

He heard her jogging to catch up to him, persistent as a fucking mosquito. “So what happened? You said he was afraid…”

Sasori stopped dead in his tracks. Sakura trailed off as she saw it, too. The trees rose tall as towers around them, solemn and white, their blue sap oozing like infected wounds. The fog that concealed their offal parted just ahead around the object that had captured the pair’s attention. 

“Is that…?” 

Sakura walked toward it, and Sasori snatched her already bruised arm without hesitation. 

“Careful,” he said.

She touched her fingers to his, a silent acknowledgment, but still looked on ahead. 

The hollowed snail’s shell was enormous. 

As big as a rich man’s house and just as wide, it took up space like a black hole takes up light. The surface was a sickly, iridescent pink so pale it was nearly white. Purple moss frosted its edges, belying its age. The mouth was tall enough for a man to walk inside and up through the looping spirals like a staircase. Within, bioluminescent mushrooms glowed blue, burning brighter when the pyreflies floated too close, stealing their light. 

It was not the only one. 

Spread out over acres among the sentinel trees, hundreds of shells sat abandoned in hues that either paled to white or darkened to black. Some were squat, tight whirls no bigger than a kick ball, while others reached astronomical heights in defiance of gravity. All of them were hollow. All of them dead. 

They had stumbled upon a graveyard.

“Incredible,” Sakura said, running her hands over the smooth shells of the Ancient Ones who had lived thousands of years ago. “There are so many…”

Sasori, too, felt strangely drawn to the skeletons of the past. There had alway been something about graveyards that called to him, even in life. Perhaps it was the permanence of them, spaces made immortal by the people who remembered those interred. The way he remembered Orochimaru even now. Or the way Sakura remembered him. 

_“Some places cannot be found, neither by the living nor the dead.”_

Sasori followed Sakura deeper into the graveyard. 

_“Only by those who remember.”_

He pressed his hand over hers on a creamy, pearlescent shell twice their height. 

_“And the ones they can’t forget.”_

She closed their fingers into a fist and looked at him.

“Why did you remember me?” he asked. 

In the gossamer gloom, she was a specter of her normally candy-vibrant color. And yet, something in her burned, invincible, just like when she broke his perfect control. He thought her hauntingly beautiful then, with a permanence to rival even these eternal graves. 

“Because you woke me up,” she said. 

_“Why puppets?”_ Orochimaru had asked him ages ago. _“They’re nothing but lifeless husks. As mindless as they are meaningless.”_

_“No,”_ Sasori had said with a conviction he felt in his wooden bones. _“They’re potential waiting to be awakened.”_

He let his gaze linger on her, strangely absorbed. “Sakura…”

The telltale quaking of an Ancient One’s passing forced Sasori and Sakura apart, and they watched as a snail as large as the slug they had encountered earlier emerged from the mists. Its corpse-white shell glittered gold under the light of the pyreflies, and Sasori and Sakura bowed reverently as it made its way. 

Sakura grinned and tugged his hand once the Ancient One had passed. “Come on, I want to see.”

They leaped atop one of the taller shells, conical and longer than it was wide, and watched the procession of slugs and snails passing through. Some were as small as a man, while others challenged the lofty canopy. Their paths were careful and practiced, ritualistic, as though they loved this timeless place and the ghosts it sheltered.

They stayed that way, quiet and content to watch giants, until they could stay awake no longer.

* * *

 

Sakura opened her eyes to darkness made full and bright by the bath of pyreflies. They floated above, steady stars in the sky, the perfect illusion. Even without the moon to mirror their fire, she could discern enough to find her way among the hollow shells. 

Soporific, she wandered, not quite seeing so much as feeling her way. Gravity sang to her, pulling her inevitably and indelibly, and all she had to do was follow the fall. Follow and trust that she would wake up tomorrow, that there was an end to this journey someday, but not today. Not tonight. 

Sasori lingered in between, neither sheltered nor apart. She thought him to be meditating for a moment, simply standing there in the gloaming, silent as death and haloed in halcyon gold. It broke her heart to dispel him, but she could not resist. 

“Sasori,” she said, her voice far and away from her own lips. 

He turned to her, and for the first time in her life Sakura understood what it was to drink in another. Those watchful eyes had reduced her to her worst and raised her to her best. What did he see in her now?

“Show me,” he said, quietly commanding. 

Sakura’s heart pounded. “Show you what?”

He reached for her with his strings, brought her closer. Long fingers caressed the angry bruise on her arm, teased her red lip, pulled it down. She tasted the pad of his thumb, pressed down on her teeth. “Show me what a human life is.”

Breathless, Sakura fisted her fingers in his shirt and pulled him flush against her to taste more of him. His lips were soft and dry, wanting for her kiss. He pressed against her, tongue and teeth and something more powerful, demanding yet deferential as he met her passion equally. Sakura moaned and threaded her fingers in his hair like she’d wanted to do again ever since she’d forced him to his knees at the lake. 

Sasori bit her lip hard, marking her again, and suddenly he was everywhere, surrounding her. Palms traced the line of her waist, the curve of her thighs, anchored the back of her neck in a vice grip. Sakura gasped at the pressure, almost painful, and she met his eyes. 

The glimpse he’d given her when they fought was nothing like what burned in him now, unfettered and arrogant. It was disdain, respect, and unbridled passion the likes of which she had never felt except from him, and it possessed her. Sakura had never felt more powerful than she did with Sasori watching her. 

“Come here,” he said. 

He lashed his strings around her waist and thighs and hoisted her up over his hips. Sakura clenched her thighs around him and buried her fingers in his beautiful hair as he slammed her against the wall of a smooth, black shell hard as diamonds. She opened for him, mouth and thighs and whatever else he desired to sink into, she didn’t care as long as it anchored them here, together. His desire was as hard and unforgiving as he was, but Sakura had never cared for his forgiveness. 

Their clothes fell forgotten around them, leaving her clad in only his strings. They broke their devouring kiss for just a moment to look at each other, to see what each had inflicted upon the other, and _god_ she loved herself in his eyes. 

“It’s this,” she whispered, desperate to make him see what she saw. “The way you look at me—ah!”

His thumb brushed her bared nipple, and she arched against him.

“How do I look at you?” He smirked against her flushed skin, tasting her as he took his time. 

“Like I’m more…” Sakura writhed when his wandering fingers found her scar—his scar—and she pressed his palm flush against it. “Like the world only exists because I’m in it.”

His strings tightened around her, and suddenly she was on her back in the grass. Above and beyond, the pyreflies wove cages of constellations around them. Sasori pressed his thumb to her scar, but his eyes never left hers. 

“You are such a martyr, Sakura,” he said poisonously, his lips barely touching hers. “Perhaps that’s why…”

She ran her hands over his chest and fantasized about sinking her nails in deep enough to reach his heart. “Why what?”

“Why you understand.” His thumb dug into her scar harshly, but he used his other hand to slip a finger into the heat between her thighs. “To be reborn, you have to die first.”

Sakura lost all sense of herself as he pleasured her to the brink of madness. She tasted the toxins and carrion fumes bonded to this haunted place, to the earth beneath them, to the two of them. But it still wasn’t enough. Chakra laced her finger tips, omnipotent, and she tugged at the strings pinning her down. Sasori groaned against her neck at the subversion, at once incensed and inspired. Not because she knew this to be true, but because she made it true. Sakura had never been naturally arrogant, but he had never tolerated anything less from her. 

He entered her with the same quiet control he exerted in everything he did, but it quickly dwindled at the mercy of their shared pleasure. She took his face in her hands and held his gaze as they moved together. 

“Sasori,” she said, thumbing the cheek she had cracked so long ago in all her righteous fury at him, at herself, at the whole goddamn system that had let it happen. 

His wolfish smirk was all the acknowledgment she got, conceited, looming phantom that he was, had always been, except that he never left her. He saw her clearly through enmity, through madness, through even his own constructed theater built from the blood and bones of those he collected. Creation out of destruction. Warmth from burning. Strength through suffering.

“Come on, Sakura,” he crooned as he watched her like an open flame. “Show me.”

Sakura cried out and arched in the soft grass as she came, and he swallowed her pleasure with a ruinous kiss like it belonged to him. Maybe it did, Sakura thought. Maybe it always had. 

He held her close after, as though to keep her. What a lovely life that could be, to be kept by another. What a lovelier death. 

“Sasori,” she called to him, maybe. Her eyes were full of starlight and her dreams were full of him. 

“Sleep,” he said, pressing a ghost of a kiss to her lips. His fingers brushed her scar, almost tender. “I have you.”

She breathed him in, blissfully numb, and drifted to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to go in this fever dream… Please share your thoughts and feedback in the comments!


	4. I Hope You Can See Ghosts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here you go, my dudes. A bit late for SasoSaku Month, but in my defense I was a) on vacation for the past two weeks and b) generally lazy.
> 
>  
> 
> [Inspiration](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKIO2FJ40Mo)

It starts with a girl, as all stories do. 

But this isn’t his story. 

* * *

He was content to watch her like this. Perched up high in his tree surrounded by pyreflies, he need only glance down to find Sakura there by the vegetable patch. She was doing pushups over the stream, her chakra working double time to keep her afloat as she pumped her muscles. Sasori’s gaze lingered on the fat snail that had taken up residence on her back, its pearly blue shell like an eye winking up at him each time Sakura straightened her arms. 

More of the creatures lounged by the banks, slugs and snails ranging in size from a paperclip to one particularly plump, black slug as long as a man was tall. It was halfway up a tree in search of the tenderly poisonous canopy leaves to eat. The smaller ones by the water bobbed their long eyestalks in time with Sakura’s pushups like little metronomes, up down, up down. 

To Sasori’s supreme displeasure, a slug the size of a dinner plate dropped onto his shoulder. He got an eyeful of the creature’s sticky, grey skin as it slowly crawled down his arm. He waited impatiently for it to leave him be and continue on around the tree before he dropped down to the ground. The slug paused and peered down at him, and he begrudgingly bowed his head to it. 

Except now he had slug slime on his sleeve. Muttering a curse, he removed his shirt and dunked it in the stream to wash. 

“Sasori?”

Sakura paused her training to look at him. He ignored her as he concentrated on his task, but she sank into the stream and waded over to him. 

“Is everything all right?”

He looked up at her—and at the snail hitching a ride on her shoulder drenching her in foul slime. Perhaps this was why she’d taken to training over the water. “It’s crowded.” 

She blinked. “They just keep coming.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed.”

Sasori hunched lower and scrubbed his shirt harder. Sakura’s fingers closed around his hands, and he looked up at her. 

She was smiling. “Are you pouting?”

Sasori was not about to dignify such an asinine question with a response. “Your shirt is filthy.”

The freeloading snail’s eyestalks twitched. Sasori felt his tenuous hold on his patience slacken, life-depending decorum be damned. 

“Are you offering to wash it?” she asked.

“What would be the point? You’ll only soil it again.”

She huffed, but she gently removed the snail from her person and slipped out of her red vest. Sasori accepted the garment and set aside his own washed shirt to focus on hers, but paused when he saw that she was additionally removing her black mesh undershirt. Bare from the waist up, she tossed the garment on the shore next to him and shrugged. 

“What? It makes more sense to just wash everything while we’re at it.”

But the look in her eyes told him a different story. He pressed his lips together and steadfastly held her gaze. “Don’t lie to me, Sakura.”

Something in her expression changed. No longer playful and coy, she watched him with a sort of sensible tranquility he used to associate with Orochimaru, and which he’d come to associate with her. Except that her understanding was worlds different from Orochimaru’s—two sides of the same coin, equal and opposite and never intersecting. 

Small, deadly hands reached for his and dragged him into the water with her. “All right, I won’t,” she said, and pulled him down for much more than a kiss. 

Their clothes were forgotten downstream, left to wash themselves.

* * *

Sakura stared up at the largest snail she had ever seen. Its corpse-white skin contrasted with an ebony shell that put the inky night sky to shame. She was on her knees, prostrated and waiting, but the snail only loomed, unmoving. 

“Please, I…” 

What? What could she possibly have to say to a primordial being centuries old and galaxies wise? How could she dare?

Sakura bowed her head. “I have to be stronger.”

The Ancient One watched her in silence, unresponsive like all the others. 

Frustrated, Sakura squeezed her eyes closed and hid from her tears. “Please,” she entreated softly. “It isn’t for me.”

Naruto, Tsunade, Ino, Lee, all her friends and family back in Konoha, they were depending on her. She couldn’t return with nothing, not with a war coming. She couldn’t stand by and watch them fall, helpless to do anything like she’d been helpless the last time.

_“You will learn,”_ Tsunade commanded her. 

Sakura dug her fingers in the salt-poisoned earth where only dead things could grow. The pyreflies cloaked her in a golden balm, pale and cold and dead like everything else in this hellish place. 

Her Yin seal pulsed, and the pyreflies swarmed. The Ancient One, however, only watched, dispassionate. 

And why? Why couldn’t she figure it out? What was she lacking? Why wasn’t she worthy? What was she even doing here?

“ _To be reborn, you have to die first.”_

What had she become after Sasori had killed her all those years ago? 

The Ancient One turned from her and crawled back into the forest whence it came, its departure as sudden as its appearance. Sakura watched it depart, watched as the trees bent to accommodate its girth, like loyal subjects taking their knees. None so large and ancient had visited her until now, and she did not know the significance of that. 

The indigo light of dusk cast a spectral glow upon the clearing and the ruins of her abode. Even humid and sticky, Sakura shivered. Not even the smallest slugs remained after the Ancient One’s departure. 

Sakura covered her mouth and stifled a sob. She gritted her teeth hard enough to hurt as she willed the tears away. 

She felt him before she heard him coming up behind her. Long, cold fingers ghosted over her shoulders, electric with chakra as he draped her in his strings. 

“I don’t understand,” she confessed. 

Sasori’s breath on her neck was warm like his hands were not, but he did not pull her close. “No, you don’t.”

She turned, unable to bear the distance. “What am I supposed to do?”

The way he regarded her was as changing as the seasons. Drenched in gold and softened in twilight, he was like smoke between her fingers, ever unattainable even now. “Why do you always ask such pointless questions?”

She nodded, though she wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t sure of much of anything these days. 

“Sakura,” he said. 

She looked up at him, and in a moment of mad longing, she wished she could keep him. Even if it meant never knowing, never learning, never waking. She wished it all the same.

“Go to sleep.”

Sakura wandered inside, and she slept.

* * *

She stares up at the eclipse and wonders when the Moon became powerful enough to block out the Sun. 

_This isn’t right_ , she thinks.

Her scar aches fiercely, but when she touches it, her fingers meet cold steel. Sharingan eyes flicker in the water, his hand on the hilt softly killing her. 

“Thank you, Sakura.”

His voice is as sharp as his steel, but this isn’t right. _He’s_ not right. She grabs the blade in her hands and paints them red. 

“You’re the one who’s not right.”

Naruto looks down on her just out of reach and far away, unable to help. The blade twists deeper, and Sakura slides against it as she tries to reach for him. 

“Oh?”

Sasuke’s hand on the hilt is as crushing as the one on her shoulder. He drives the blade that isn’t his deeper. Raven hair whispers at her nape. 

_Wait for me, please!_

She wants to call out to Naruto. Surely if he could hear her, he would wait. He would help her like he always does. But it is so hard to see him beyond the shadows closing in on her now from all sides.

And all Sakura can do is reach for the shadows where Naruto has gone, and she cannot follow.

* * *

Sasori lounged in his preferred tree while Sakura slept, entertaining himself bouncing a pyrefly on his strings. As always, she had invited him to stay with her, and as always he declined. She never pushed him or asked him why. He suspected she already knew, anyway, and yet she always offered her hand and a place to rest. 

Sleep did not call to Sasori now, and he lingered in the darkness that wasn’t truly dark surrounded by the pyreflies. The infernal slugs and snails were gone for now, but he did not take any particular joy in that. There was no breathing easier even in their absence; the air was still thick with poison as it had always been, only now…

He fisted his hand, and his strings constricted with enough force to crush stone. The pyrefly in his grasp snuffed and dissipated to hazy smoke. He followed its path along the breeze back to the ruins where Sakura slept and noticed a strange, glowing light coming from within.

_What is that woman doing now?_

Sasori slipped out of the tree and landed quietly in the grass. As he straightened, he heard it: a deep, groaning roar from the shadows. It seemed to come from everywhere at once. He paused and peered into the gloom, but sensed nothing. It had been some time since they’d heard the eldritch thunder of the Ancient Ones. Sasori clenched his fists, but there was no pretending they did not tremble. 

_“Why do you want to live forever?”_ he’d asked Orochimaru, years ago. 

Orochimaru had looked at him with genuine surprise, such an odd look on the Sannin. _“I don’t. I simply want to prove that I can.”_

And what good would that do? Anyone who would care would waste away and die long before him, rendering his accomplishment empty in the end. 

_“But they would die knowing that I could,”_ Orochimaru said with a laugh, like they were two friends sharing midnight secrets over tea. _“There are some forces in this world far more powerful than even death, Sasori.”_

It wasn’t until years later when Sasori opened his dead eyes to a waiting Sakura that he began to understand a little of what Orochimaru meant. 

He stalked toward the ruins and the spectral light within, in search of her.

* * *

Sometimes I wonder…

_Who would I be without you?_

A meaningless question.

.

.

.

_You will never be without me._

* * *

When she opens her eyes, she is where she remembers she ought to be. The sun’s filmy rays bask the clearing in grey morning light. At her feet, which are bare, Sakura feels the slimy pull of a slug, black as night and striped in silver. She bends to pick it up and cradle it in her palm, such a small thing. Tears brighten her eyes, and she smiles. 

“I thought you’d left me,” she says. 

“They haven’t left you. They’re only waiting for you to wake up.”

Sakura startles at the sound of that familiar voice that wrenches her heart with a longing so deep, so true it is a physical ache in her bones. She turns, Tsunade’s name upon her lips, but it dies there as she takes in the face of a woman she does not know but recognizes as easily as she does her own. After all, she has spent endless hours studying her life and history. 

“Mito Uzumaki,” Sakura breathes as she cradles the slug to her chest. “But—I-I don’t…”

Mito smiles. Her Yin seal marks the source of her infamous power, and her eyes are a match for Sakura’s vibrant jade, but that is where any similarity between them ends. Mito’s hair is long and flows down her like blood from a severed vein, and she is tall and willowy where Sakura is short and muscular. She is breathtakingly beautiful in her corpse-white shift, Sakura thinks. A queen by birthright and a kunoichi by blood right, she is one of the most powerful and respected shinobi of her time. A time long past. Mito is long dead.

“I’m dreaming,” Sakura ponders.

“You’ve been doing quite a lot of that lately.” Mito floats past her and touches the spongy bark of a tree—Sasori’s tree, yes, the one he normally sits in. He isn’t there now, though. “I did too, when I stood where you are.”

“Where I… You remember? Being here, training with the Ancient Ones…” The slug in Sakura’s hands watches her quietly.

Mito glances back at her. “It was long ago, but that’s the power of this place.” She gestures at the trees, and when Sakura looks up, she sees more slugs and snails winding around the trunks, in the leaves, all of them watching. “It remembers.”

Sakura is confused. Her dreams have never felt so real before, and she has never felt so in control of herself in them. Why, just moments ago, she was pushing against a cold steel blade, bleeding out, reaching for Naruto. 

She presses a hand to her scar, but it is dry and puckered, as it has always been. And besides, that isn’t Sasuke’s scar. 

“You remember, too,” Mito says.

Sakura sees her watching, and she wonders how much Mito has seen, how much she knows. “I don’t understand, but I feel like I should.”

Mito smiles. “Memory is tricky like that. The body is willing, but the mind is more stubborn. Of course, you’ve had the answer all along.”

Sakura shakes her head. “I’m not like you. You’re Mito Uzumaki, the greatest kunoichi of your time—of _all_ time.”

“And who are you?”

“I—”

_“You’re my best friend,”_ Ino promises her.

_“You’re the best, most beautiful, most amazing girl I’ve ever met!”_ Naruto laughs. 

_“You’re annoying,”_ Sasuke says, exasperated. 

Mito faces her. “Who are you?”

Sakura shakes her head. “I don’t…”

_“You’re my favorite student,”_ Kakashi confides in her when no one else is around.

_“You’re stronger than you know. You’ve already surpassed me,”_ Tsunade tells her before sending her to this hellish place. 

_“There aren’t many girls as chivalrous as you,”_ Chiyo says, and she is right.

“I’m—”

_“You’re one hell of a girl,”_ Sasori says as he watches her rise from the dead with the antidote she created. 

_She_ , not Chiyo, not Tsunade, not Kakashi or Naruto or Sasuke or anybody else. 

“Yes,” Mito says. She is closer now, so bright. Her red trails behind her, swollen and rushing, flooding. _“You_ , not anybody else.”

“Me…”

_They came here…for me._

Not for Ino, not for Naruto, not for Tsunade or Lee or her parents or Sasori. All this time, it has always been about her.

Mito is close enough to touch now, and she does. Cold, dead fingers brush the Yin seal on Sakura’s forehead. “Remember, Sakura. Remember why you’re really here.”

Veins of light burn bright upon the slugs and snails descending around them, upon Sakura’s skin, in the rushing river of red between them. Sakura opens her mouth to scream and swallows it whole, drowning, but Mito is here with her at the bottom, in the trees, in the air she can’t breathe. She has always been here, waiting to waken, and Sakura…

_Why I’m really here is—_

* * *

“Sasori?”

She didn’t startle him. Sasori did not _startle_. But she opened her eyes at the uncanny moment when he deigned to touch her forehead, aglow with strange power neither of them quite understood. 

She looked up at him from her bed like the sight of him saddened her beyond words. Even so, she smiled. 

She reached for him. 

“Please stay,” she asked. “Just for a little while.”

Her skin was warm beneath his fingertips, though her light had faded. Only the pyreflies remained to illuminate her face and all the feeling she wore like armor. Flickers, fleeting.

Hallucinations. 

The forest was not around them, but in her. 

Sasori nodded, understanding and wondering if she did yet. “Just for a little while.”

Her joy and her melancholy were so nostalgic that he had no words for her but to slip into bed beside her. She fit in his arms, and he in hers, and he thought everything of the kiss he left upon her brow as she drifted off to sleep.

* * *

Sometimes he wonders—what if?

What if he’d lived?

An irrelevant question. If he’d lived, he wouldn’t be here now, for she would be dead. Dead by his hands, as it should have been.

_“So little has worked out as it should have for you, hasn’t it old friend?”_

Still, sometimes he wonders. 

What if?

What if he’d stayed behind? What if he’d grown up? What if he’d been saved? Who could he have saved in turn? 

_You saved me_ , she says. 

No, she never said that. But maybe she did. 

Maybe she did.

* * *

The slugs and snails returned, and Sakura felt as though she had regrown a limb she had lost. Large and small, they invaded in droves. She ate with them, bathed with them, trained with them, and slept among them. 

Sasori did not care for their presence, but he did not utter a word of complaint against them. She felt his eyes on her as she sat with them and flexed her chakra. The pyreflies gathered to her like moths to the flame, ebbing and flowing with Sakura’s Yin seal. The smaller slugs absorbed her chakra and swelled, but the larger ones returned it two-fold, and Sakura felt herself begin to swell, to transform.

Beyond, the forest’s eldritch yawning signaled an Ancient One’s passing in the shadows, and Sakura wondered what it would feel like to share chakra with it. 

She looked back at Sasori when the Ancient One was out of earshot and found him watching her, perhaps wondering the same thing. But neither of them voiced the thought. 

It was easier to pretend that way. 

* * *

She was wasting time. 

Of course, this did not surprise him in the least. Sakura had always been the type to drag things out unnecessarily. 

“What do you want for dinner?” she asked as she chopped vegetables. 

A pointless question. They ate the same things every day, whether in soup form or raw form. They both knew what she was doing; her rouse was so transparent that it was almost offensive. 

“Sakura.”

She looked up at him where he stood in the doorway. Satisfied that he had her full attention, he turned and exited the ruins. Predictably, she followed him, but he did not wait for her. 

Beyond their clearing, the woods were dark and deep, but they were far from empty. High above in the canopy, an Ancient One had curled itself around a tree and chewed on the choicest leaves. The slug was thirty feet long and bone white with two bloody red stripes down its back. 

“What are we doing out here?” 

Sasori reached for the trees with one hand and for her with the other. “Conquering your fear.”

Sakura yelped as he yanked her off her feet with his strings like a yo-yo and launched them both high into the canopy closer to the Ancient One. They landed on a lower branch and bowed their heads low out of respect. The Ancient One paused its chewing to regard them. 

She squeezed his hand hard enough to hurt. “ _Sasori_.”

“You’re acting like a child,” he snapped at her. 

She flushed, her anger as plain as day, but she held her tongue. The Ancient One’s eye stalks swiveled closer, but it remained as silent as her. 

“You said you wanted my help,” he said.

“I do,” she said. 

“Then accept it.”

She watched him like there was nothing else worth seeing, just for a moment. Sasori was suddenly reminded of Deidara, that idiotic fool who knew so little and accomplished even less in his short life. 

Sakura was on her feet and moving away from him, but that moment stayed with him. He wondered if Deidara would have found her beautiful then, wondered what he would have seen, what it might feel like. But all Sasori saw was her back to him as she reached for something impossible simply because he’d told her she could, and she believed him. 

The pyreflies dimmed as they converged on Sakura and the Ancient One, taking all the light and life with them. Sasori clutched his throat, unable to breathe for a terrifying moment. There was only her and the power she kept as close as a lover, as mad as this place and sunshine bright. It filled her and built her until she was more, so much more.

_Death in full bloom._

There for a moment, gone the next. And her, still full of cracks. 

He caught her where she collapsed, her Yin seal receding and her fingertips blue with the remnants of the power she’d borrowed from the Ancient One. Silver-bright eyes beamed up at him, gone in a blink, and there she was again. 

It wasn’t enough. 

Her laughter, tired but sweet, carried him as he carried her. The Ancient One watched them go. 

“Did you feel that?” she asked, touching her eyes, though they were back to their vivid green and unmarked. 

“Yes.”

It wasn’t enough, he wanted to tell her. 

“I’ve never felt such power. It was so…”

_It’s not enough._

He set her down on the grass near the water, careful not to disturb the crawling slugs and snails. Her hand closed around his, worried he might leave her alone. 

“Sasori,” she said, again with longing. She longed for so much these days, it seemed to him. 

“Stew,” he said. “That’s what we’ll have for dinner.”

Her eyes glistened as she smiled. “All right.”

* * *

How does it end?

.

.

.

This story…

.

.

.

_It starts with a girl._

.

.

.

But it’s not his story.

* * *

It was a time late at night for gallows and gilded light, a witching hour, and she was the only creature dwelling in the shadows. No crickets sang, no frogs croaked. Just peace, serenity. Sakura had grown to love nights in the Shikkotsu Forest the most.

Sasori emerged from the darkness of the wood, wraithlike under the pale fire of his carrion followers. The pyreflies were ever silent as they faithfully trailed him back to Sakura, and he sat down by the stream’s edge next to her. 

“You should be sleeping,” he said. 

She opened her palm and caught a pyrefly, as she’d seen him do so often before. It settled there, cold and yet teeming with force. “Is that really what I should be doing?”

He regarded her askance. Sakura did not look at him, but she could feel the weight of his gaze like she’d felt his hands on her body earlier that day, solid and anchoring. She tried to hold on to that feeling of being tethered to something real and alive and hers, just a little longer. 

He shifted, and for one terrifying, tantalizing moment, she fantasized that he would argue. 

“You’re done wasting time, then,” he said instead. 

Sakura laughed, because it was predictable, because it was him, and because she would rather laugh than cry. “You wasted your words for me once. I figured the least I could do was waste something precious for you, too.”

He took his time answering, and for a moment she thought he might not at all. “You owe me nothing, Sakura.”

Sakura bit her lip to keep it from trembling. She closed her fingers around the pyrefly and watched as it dissipated to pastel smoke. “Not even an apology?”

“Do you think so little of me?”

She turned to him, but he wasn’t looking at her as he stared into the darkness of the forest. Far away, a deep groaning signaled an Ancient One’s approach. “Fate is strange.”

“I don’t believe in fate.” He regarded her askance. “This is entirely your own fault.”

Sakura held his gaze, unsure if she had really heard what he’d just said. But the look in his eyes was that same immutable melancholy that it had been in the cave. “Sasori…” Her eyes glistened with the urge to weep. “No one has ever believed in me like you do.”

He watched her like he had always known this. “You’ll build castles,” he said. “Conquer death. Perhaps you’ll even find this place again, someday.”

The trees groaned and parted, revealing the towering form of the Ancient One who had abandoned her once before. Its pale skin and shimmered in the diffuse starlight, and its inky shell melted into the shadows. Long eyestalks quivered and settled on Sakura and Sasori, and it bowed its broad head to level with them. 

Sakura’s tears were cold upon her cheeks, and her body ached—to touch him, to keep him, to feel this pain that was so real it could not possibly be just a dream. “I don’t need any of that, only—” Her voice hitched, and she covered her mouth to stifle a sob. 

“Hm.” His lips curled in a smirk. “You really are nothing like Orochimaru. And that’s why…”

He rose, but instead of reaching for her, he reached for the Ancient One, who continued to watch them patiently. Golden chakra coated his fingers and glowed where he touched the giant snail. The pyreflies draping him swelled and swirled. 

Sakura got to her feet, afraid for him, afraid _of_ him, and of what he might do. “Sasori, wait. Please—”

He held out his other hand to her. “I’m done waiting for you, Sakura.”

Sakura blinked through her tears. This was so fast, so soon, and she knew what she had to do but it _hurt_ and she wasn’t sure she would survive it this time. But he had made up his mind a long time ago back in that cave when he let Chiyo’s final attack hit him. 

Sakura hugged herself and wished she could hold him instead. “You bastard. I will _never_ forget you. Even if it takes me a hundred years, I swear… I’ll definitely get you for this.”

His expression fell, and for just a moment, she saw the uncertainty in his pretty eyes, the longing, the faith in her that had never once forgotten, even when she herself did. 

And then, he smiled. A true, sad, subtle smile that shattered her completely. “Well then… Until then, I hope you can see ghosts.”

Sakura did not trust her voice or the time they had left. The pyreflies spiraled faster, and every vein in her body ached as a familiar power swelled within her, too much to contain for longer. She grasped his hand and pulled him close in a kiss she felt like thunder beneath her skin. Her eyes flooded with golden light, and her forehead burned as the Yin seal released and enveloped them both. His arms were tight around her, consuming, and she pulled them closer, closer. 

When the light died and she opened her silver eyes, the pyreflies were gone and the canopy above opened up to the clear night sky, the first unobstructed glimpse of it she had seen since before she set foot in this mad place. Poison in her lungs tasted sweet and rich, and each breath she drew sobered her further. 

“Hello, Sakura,” said an old, rumbling, feminine voice. “We have waited so very long to finally meet you.”

Sakura’s blue-stained fingertips were flat upon the Ancient One’s nose, brimming with power and the head-spinning shock of epiphany. The path through the forest was clear, the way back not far off. The snail’s speech was as easy to understand as her own. And…

Tears flowed along the bright blue trails down her cheeks, paths branded into her very skin, and she understood everything. 

The snail bumped her chest softly. “My child, I feel your pain.”

Sakura could not hold back her sobs any longer. She threw her arms around the ancient snail’s nose and clung to her, shaking with relief and sadness and power like she had never known before. 

There was no trace left of Sasori but the marks on her skin and the strength in her veins he had reminded her had always been there. 

She need only remember.

* * *

Wars are long

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.

.

But memory is longer still

.

.

.

Sometimes she wonders—

.

.

.

_Do ghosts remember?_

* * *

“What do you mean, you’re _leaving_?” Ino sputtered. She nearly spit out her ramen.

“ _Temporarily_. Do you even listen?” Sakura crossed her arms and sat back on her stool. She had gotten together for lunch at Ichiraku’s with her two favorite blonds.

“How long is temporarily?” Naruto said, suspicious. “The war just ended and we only just got back, like, last week!”

“I don’t know, not permanently. I thought I would go to Kumogakure and assist with the new surgery they’re opening up. They lost a lot of good medics in the war to the Zetsu clones.” Sakura sipped her tea, grim as she remembered that dark day and all the lives they had lost before she herself had discovered the infiltration. 

“But that’s, like, hundreds of miles away!” Naruto complained. 

Ino narrowed her eyes and grinned wickedly. “Oh, I see what this is about. Isn’t Shī the one running that new division?”

“Who?” Naruto frowned. 

Sakura flushed. “That’s _not_ what this is about. He just happened to mention that they could use as many master medical ninja as possible to help train the new recruits, and it isn't like I’m doing anything important right now, anyway.”

Ino looked positively feral. “Riiiiiight, and he just _happens_ to be stupidly attractive and single.”

“He’s a _professional_ and we _work_ together. That’s it, seriously.”

“Oh yeah, nothing says ‘strictly professional’ like working together in close quarters for weeks on end saving lives and depending on each other to survive. _Definitely_ no blurred boundaries there.”

Naruto looked between the two women. “Hold on, it kinda sounds like Ino’s saying you like this guy? When did this happen?”

“It didn’t happen and I _don’t_ ,” Sakura said, exasperated. “I mean, yes, he’s a wonderful person and an extremely adept medic, and sure we get along well. But!” She raised her hand to silence Ino. “We’re just friends. Anyway, I’m going to Kumogakure and it’s _not_ a date.”

Ino snorted. “Whatever, Forehead. You keep telling yourself that. In the meantime, there’s no harm in keeping your options open. You’re young, you’re gorgeous—right, Naruto?”

“Oh, yeah, super gorgeous.” He winked and gave her a thumbs up.

“Oh god,” Sakura grumbled, but she couldn’t hide her smile. 

“And you’re, like, one of the strongest kunoichi in our generation. I mean, you’re a freaking Sage! Who even does that.”

“Hey, I’m a Sage, too,” Naruto said. 

“Naruto, not everything is about you,” Ino chided. “Anyway, the _point_ is that you deserve good things, Sakura. The war’s over. It’s okay to find happiness.”

Sakura thought about Ino’s words as the days dragged by. They were so banal that she may have taken them for granted coming from anyone else, at any other time, but… 

Tsunade did not argue with her request for an extended leave. 

“Sakura, you’re a master medical ninja and a Slug Sage. You hardly need my permission to visit the Shikkotsu Forest. If anything, our positions are reversed,” Tsunade said. 

“Thank you, Lady Tsunade. And thank you for agreeing to let me go to Kumogakure. I think I could do a lot of good there.”

“I know you will.”

She turned to leave, but Tsunade’s voice stopped her. “Sakura?”

“Yes?”

“You returned and we were already heading off to war, so there was no time. But… I was wondering if you would tell me about your experience in the Shikkotsu Forest sometime, if you’re willing to share. Mito told me a little, but I was a child at the time.”

Sakura regarded the Hokage, recalling what Mito had told her about her time in the sacred forest. 

_Death in full bloom._

“I’ll do you one better,” Sakura said with a smile. 

The summoning had to be done outside of Konoha’s walls, and when the smoke cleared, Sakura craned her neck to look up at the colossal height of her king summon. 

“Lady Tsunade, please meet Sazae.” Sakura bowed to the ancient snail who had first spoken to her and formed a contract after so many years confined to the Shikkotsu Forest. “You probably don’t remember her, but she knows you quite well.”

Tsunade stared, wide-eyed as a child. “Sazae… That was the name of my grandmother’s summon.”

Sazae’s ebony shell shimmered in the bright, Fire Country sunlight, and she lowered her head to level with Tsunade. “I sense the spirit of Lady Mito in you. Ah, the mark of our power…” She touched her nose to Tsunade’s forehead, and the Yin seal began to glow. 

Sakura had only seen Tsunade cry once, when news of Jiraiya’s death reached her. Back then, she had been ashamed of her tears, tried to hide them. A Hokage had to be strong, immutable. Now, she wept openly as she looked upon something she had thought lost forever, a piece of the family that had long since left her alone as the last Senju. 

It was another day before Sakura and Sazae departed for the Shikkotsu forest, and the snail was in high spirits after a night of reminiscing about her first summoner. Sakura had never seen Tsunade so vibrant, not even before the war. Just talking about Mito with one who loved her as much as she did raised her from the dead as though she had never left. Sakura was captivated listening to them both as they spoke of epic quests to tame the nine tailed beasts, wars fought over land and resources and the right to live, and a future that had begun as a dream shared by children. 

That night stayed with her as she and Sazae made their long way back to the Shikkotsu Forest on the way to Kumogakure, and Sazae bade her go on alone. 

“I have lived my life in this sacred forest,” Sazae said. “It will be here for me when you are long gone. I shall wait for you here.”

And so, Sakura continued on alone. The acrid air hit her lungs like venom, but she took a deep breath and savored the burn. Pyreflies gathered to her as if to greet on old friend, and she held her hands out for them. Power brimmed beneath her skin, in her veins, at the corners of her vision, and when she opened her eyes, she opened her heart and soul to it, too. 

A pyrefly darted between her blue-stained fingers, and it too turned blue as it absorbed power from Sakura. She smiled and followed the little fae light along a familiar path. The slugs and snails she passed perked up at her passing and slowly followed at their own, sedate pace, drawn to the strength she had cultivated and embraced in this dreary, dead place. 

The ruins were much as she’d left them, bone white and embossed in ancient seals Mito had carved with her own two hands. She was here, too. Lingering in the shadows, she was as much a part of this place as the slugs and snails that followed in Sakura’s footsteps. The forest remembered her, as it would remember Sakura when her time was up, too. 

“Death in full bloom,” Sakura said, catching a pyrefly in her hands and watching it grow. “You were right about this place.”

The war had been long, but her memory was longer. And in this place where time is strange and dreams are real, life found a way beyond death. 

Sakura closed her marked eyes and held the pyrefly close to her heart. It was cold to the touch. 

She thought about Kumogakure, of the people she hadn’t met yet, of the mark they would leave on her life, and she on theirs. Of the memories they would make, and the choices that would change everything. 

“I’ll build castles,” she whispered to no one at all. “I’ll conquer death.”

_And someday…_

Someday, she would find this place again, when her time was up and she could not take another step. 

But until then—

Sakura gasped and opened her eyes. The pyrefly she had been holding dissipated into smoke and reabsorbed within her. Through the gloom there was not a soul to be seen, not even a single slug had followed her all the way here. 

And yet, she could have sworn…

Sakura hugged herself close and smiled sadly. The memory of his arms around her lingered, phantomwise, and she held on to it for just a little while longer. 

* * *

“She’s here, sir.”

Shī looked up from the paperwork he was filling out on his desk. He was weeks behind due to the war, and since his superior had been killed by a Zetsu clone in the medical camp, he returned home to find himself the newly appointed head medic because there simply was no one else. He ran a hand through his short, blond hair and stared at his assistant for a breath too long. 

“The Konoha medic, sir?” the stout man said gently. 

Shī’s eyes widened and he abruptly stood up. “Of course, please send her in.”

The stout assistant bowed and excused himself, and Shī rubbed his tired eyes. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in days, and he knew there were bags forming under his dark eyes. It was a vain thought, but he didn’t want her to see him so ragged now that the war was done. Not that she had ever minded before, but…

Shī quickly skimmed his neon fingers under his eyes to soothe the swelling with a bit of medical chakra. He barely finished before the door opened again and his assistant reappeared. 

“Sakura Haruno, sir,” he said and excused himself. 

She was as vibrant as he remembered despite their dreary work in the medical camps, and despite himself, he smiled at the sight of her. “Miss Haruno, you made it.”

“How many times do I have to ask you to call me Sakura?”

Shī swallowed. “At least once more.”

She crossed her arms, but her green eyes danced with mirth. She was happy to see him. “See that it’s the last time, _sir_.”

The honorific sent a chill down his spine. “We’re not in uniform anymore, and I’m not your superior, Sakura.” He hesitated as he tried out her name. 

“Glad we’re on the same page.” 

It took him a moment to realize that she was teasing him. In his office. Where they were no longer superior and subordinate. 

Well…he supposed he could get used to the more equal footing between them. 

He walked around his desk and held out his hand for her. “In any case, thank you so much for coming. I look forward to working with you again.”

She was still smiling, but there was something less teasing and more serene about her look. She accepted his hand. “Yeah. Me too.”

Feeling bold and banking on her good mood, he added, “On a more personal note, I know you and I had a bit of a rocky start, but I hope you know how much I’ve come to respect you. You’re an incredibly talented kunoichi and I can think of no one I would rather have here by my side.”

A pause.

Shī flushed and retracted his hand as though she’d burned him. “I-I mean, of course I mean that in a professional sense. Not that you’re not incredible generally, which you are—I mean, an incredible _medic_ , and…”

She laughed. “It’s all right, I understand. Please don’t go into cardiac arrest in your office or your superiors will think I had something to do with it.”

Shī set his jaw and willed himself to _calm down_. “Of course not, my apologies…”

He told her about her accommodations for the duration of her extended stay and offered to show her to them, which she gratefully accepted. 

“Sakura?” he said as they made their way down the main street.

“Yes, Shī?”

He swallowed the odd shiver he got at hearing his name in her voice. “I just want to thank you again. All, ah…all else aside, I think we have an opportunity to build something truly great here.”

She slowed, and he stopped to turn back to her. She had her eyes closed as she stood there in the middle of the street. 

“Sakura?” he asked, concerned. 

She opened her eyes, and he was a little bit dazzled by her smile. “We’ll build castles,” she said. “Conquer death.”

Despite himself, he returned her smile. Something about the conviction in her words moved him. “If anyone can, I suppose you could.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I know I can.”

Shī didn’t quite understand, but she seemed determined. And from what he had seen of her in the war, a determined Sakura could do anything. 

“I know you can, too,” he said. 

Her smile became a laugh, and she skipped ahead of him. “Are you coming?”

He followed her, determined not to be left behind. It was going to be a long and difficult year, to be sure, but something told him the days would be a bit brighter with her here to brave them with him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mean, if we’re channeling 2014 Naruto energy (which we are), then I’m throwing some ShiSaku in there. Sorry not sorry.
> 
> I wanted the ending to this to be uplifting. Whatever magic was sustaining Sasori isn’t something that could just bring him back to life like no big deal (at least, in this particular fic). And he was never the point of this story, Sakura was. I was always so moved by how their meeting inspired her to be better and believe in herself and even question what she had previously taken for granted, and so I wanted to run with that extremely positive takeaway from their fleeting canon encounter. I always envisioned ending this on a note where Sakura has achieved something truly worthy of her outstanding character development through (most of) canon, remembered the faith Sasori had in her that inspired her to believe in herself too, and ended up on a new path toward success on her own terms.
> 
> So in the end, I guess this is my love letter to Sakura, a character I grew to appreciate a lot over the course of the original manga. She’s great and she deserves happiness, and I think Sasori would agree. ;)
> 
> There is no sequel planned for this, but I do sincerely appreciate your comments and kudos! Please do leave some on your way out if you have a bit of time.


End file.
